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EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE. Language which expresses the opinion, attitude and point of view of a speaker or writer is sometimes called evaluative language.
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Language which expresses the opinion, attitude and point of view of a speaker or writer is sometimes called evaluative language.
Evaluation is intended, in simple terms, as ‘the indication that something is good or bad’.Not necessarily in a strictly moral sense: good can be intended as ‘profitable’, enjoyable’, ‘sensible’ and so on, bad as the opposite of all these.
Evaluation is the very basis of persuasion, in politics as in life. The persuader uses evaluative language to convince his or her audience that their own opinions are good, alternative ones are not good, that their proposals are worthy and logical (good), those of their opponents illogical or dangerous (bad), that they themselves are honest and trustworthy (good) and maybe that others who disagree with them are not (bad).
Evaluation can be expressed overtly or covertly. Covert or implicit evaluation is so called because the speaker or writer provides no obvious linguistic clues, but exploits the audience’s ability to recognize a good – or bad – thing when they see it.
Overt or explicit evaluation, on the other hand, can be achieved through grammatical, textual or lexical means, as we will now see.
Grammatical evaluation Comparatives (better/worse than, richer/poorer than, etc,) are an obvious indication of evaluation. e.g. because Britain deserves better ... Because you deserve better (Labour) Transitivity is the grammatical structuring which tells us ‘who does what to whom (and how)’. It enables (and in fact forces) the language user to place the participants and events in a particular order and allows him or her to express evaluations of responsibility.
Consider the differences between: John argued with Sue; Sue argued with John; John and Sue argued; or between: William and Mary got a divorce; William divorced his wife, Mary; Mary was divorced by William; William got a divorce (where no other participant is mentioned except William).
Or between the following two headlines which describe the ‘same’ event which took place in Zimbabwe: Police shoot 11 dead in Salisbury riot (Guardian) Rioting blacks shot dead by police (Times)
Textual evaluation Evaluation can also be expressed by the particular positioning or ordering of ‘blocks’ of language in certain places in a text. The final paragraphs of newspaper editorials tend to indicate favoured solutions to problems proposed in the previous parts of the text.
If a politician, for example, presents two alternative policies to his/her audience, one of which he/she agrees with and wishes to persuade the audience to adopt, and one of which he/she does not, he7she will generally talk of the one he/she does not approve of first and the one he/she wants to promote second.
Lexical evaluation The most obvious signs of evaluation are probably contained in the lexis. The words and phrases a speaker or writer uses. We can divide all the words in the language into: grammar words – determiners (the, a one, some) - linkers (and, because, since) - prepositions (in, at, from, by, across)
Content words: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs an enormous variety of content words have evaluation as part, often most, of their meaning. Let’s consider: splendid, miserable, untrue, happily, unfortunately, success, failure, win, lose
