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Evaluation in Context
Edited by Geoff Thompson † and Laura Alba-Juez
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 242] 2014
► pp. 321–344

The expression of evaluation in weekly news magazines in English

This chapter investigates the expression of evaluation in a corpus collected from weekly news magazines in English in an attempt to address two main research questions. I investigate, first, the linguistic patterns regularly associated with the expression of evaluation in this written register and, second, the place of evaluative expressions in this discourse type and the implications for the organization of the text. The analysis has identified five main patterns associated with evaluation: copular constructions, cleft constructions, lexical means, markers of modality and other devices, such as conditional or comparative clauses in contexts of evaluation. For the second question, evaluation has been found to concentrate in some texts either at the end or at a point where it reflects the views of a third party in the story. However, there is insufficient evidence to claim that in news magazines evaluation tends to occur at boundary points in the text.
Published online: 4 February 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.242.16mar
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