1. Evaluation Elisa C.,Marika C.,Valentina C.

2. What is Evaluation ?  Definition : “Evaluation is the broad cover term for the expression of the speaker or writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feeling about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about.” (Geoff Thompson and Susan Hunston)

3. Evaluation  Evaluation is the speaker’s/writer’s judgement on what he or she is talking about. It is a binary sistem : the speaker or the writer can give a positive evaluation or a negative evaluation. The context play the main characther of the show.

4. Example  Two drunken mums have catfight in street after leaving babies home alone (the Mirror-Tabloid) Catfight is a term for an altercation between two women, often characterized as involving scratching, slapping, hair-pulling, and shirt-shredding. It can also be used to describe women insulting each other verbally This sentence has a negative evaluation.

5.  Evaluation has many functions:  Social  Psychological  Cohesive

6. Social Function  It expresses group belonging by warning bad things and advertising good ones. It assures that the speakers and the audience share the same system of value. This value-system in turn is a component of the ideology which lies behind every text. Thus, identifying what the writer thinks reveals the ideology of society that has produces the text.

7. Example  “ My husband runs his own business and is a workaholic. Last year he kept putting off our plans for a break and I got so fed up I went away with four friends. We had a great time, even though I missed him. I want a holiday for just us this year but he keeps saying I’d probably have a better time if I went with them. How can I get him to see I’d rather go with him? “

8. Psychological Function  Evaluation can be used by the speaker to manipulate the behaviours of the audience. The speaker can uses it to convince about what should be seen as right and proper and what not, for this reason we can speak of engine of persuasion. it gives to the audience the same speaker’s point of view.

9. Example In marketing  Advertising slogans can play an important role in supporting or undermining a brand extension strategy by drawing attention to attributes of the product.

10. An example: Mc Donald’s adverts french fries giving them a positive evaluation.

11. Cohesive  Evaluation in texts helps to maintain comprehensibility for the listener and harmony in the speech.

12. How to recognize Evaluation…  Evaluation can be expressed overtly ( affective evaluation ) or non overtly ( modality ).

13. Overt markers  Lexical  grammatical  textual.

14. Lexical  l exical units can be categorised in three groups: 1- Items whose evaluative weight is intrinsic and their meaning is very easily identified ( for ex: wonderful or terrible) 2- Items evaluatively neutral at least at first sigh and when free of context. Looking at this type of lexical unit make us understand how evaluation is cumulative. It acquire an evaluative meaning if related or part of a cohesive chain. 3-Items with a predominantly good or bad evaluative functions. We can identify this kind of item in their interaction with other items of a particular polarity. This type of lexical unit is also known as SEMANTIC PROSODY.

15. Grammatical  Comparators -comparative adjectives and adverbs; adverbs of degree; comparator adverbs such as just, only, at least -expressions of negativity ( morphological such as un- and other affixes, grammatical such as not,never, hardly and lexical such as fail,lack)  Verb’s structures -the use of past tense to indicate remoteness - structure beginning in “it is” and “there”

16. Textual  Textual: Evaluation can be implicit or conceptual with no obvious linguistic markers, in this case it exploits audience ability to recognize bad or good thinks of what has been said. ( social impulse) Example: William and Mary got a divorce William divorced his wife, Mary. Mary was divorced by William. William got a divorce.

17. Evaluation and control  Firstly we will illustrate the importance of the notion of control for speakers and how it is bound up with evaluation, then, we will proceed to showing how it can help to solve some of the difficulties authors found in the evaluation theory, in particular the ones related to the description of evaluative (semantic) prosodies.

18. Control: the linguistic unit  “Control” is something that people would rather have than not have, though the extent of control in one’s hands needs to be balanced: lack of control is negatively evaluated as well excessive control. The expressions “being out of control” and “control freakery” are both negatively connoted. Moreover, being under the control of someone else can be evaluated as a negative event or a positive one, depending on the kind of event or situation: -A man has control over a prostitute = negative form of control -Referee who rules the game = positive form of control Therefore, the notion of control involves both questions of who has it and who has not and also how much and how tight the control is.

19. Control and power relations In general, not being in control threatens both our positive face (our sense of competence, worth and esteem) and our negative one (autonomy, freedom of movement and right to personal space). Therefore, an evaluation of power relations will depend on point of view : in a war, A-team will evaluate as positive a situation in which it’s in control; for B-team, this fact will surely be negative. It may also be that socialization has resulted in perceived obligations which encourage self-control and even if there’s no other person to control us, a concern for others can become a form of obligation enforcing control of self.

20. The control feature and evalutative prosody  The notion of control or lack of control over events or one’s environment is often associated with evaluation even when the lexical item “control” or a synonym does not appear overtly in the co-text. We examine some of the items which have been discussed in the literature on evaluative prosody:

21. Itemes: -set in -sit through -undergo -Budge -Persistence/persistent -Break out -Outbreak -End up -Cause -Fuel -Fickle and flexible -Orchestrate -True feelings

22. One more example..  To give you an overview on how evaluation works, we have analyse a little extract of Martin Luther King’s speech.

23. The context  " I Have a Dream " is a public speech delivered by American civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. on August 28, 1963, in which he calls for an end to racism in the United States. Delivered to over 250,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington, the speech was a defining moment of the American Civil Rights Movement.

24.  Three factors added to the impact of the speech: The remarkable emotion of King’s delivery in terms of both voice and body The site at which it was delivered – on the steps of the memorial to the President who defeated southern states over the issue of slavery The mood of the day, a sense of perpetuated slavery among black people and the gradual realisation of a sense of guilt among white people

25. The speech  I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration (it relates to power relations: people demonstrate against their government actions; the government denies human rights to Negros, claiming control over their lives. Negros are manifesting to get their freedom back: it is positively evaluated) for freedom in the history of our nation.

26.  Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves (it indicates a condition in which a person has no control over his/her life. S/he is totally subjected to others’ will) who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.(captivity has a negative evaluation in this collocation it creates a contrast with the positivity given at the beginning)

27.  But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

28.  In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check ( in this sentence the evaluation can be ambiguous but at the end of the paragraph, we understand that the expression takes a negative evaluation). When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir (the verb “to fall” usually indicates a situation in which the subject has no control over the outcomes of an event. It is usually associated with negative outcomes or collocates, for instance it could mean “to die” or “to collapse” or “to fall ill”. However, in this case the verb “to fall” is positively evaluated, given that the outcomes are positive even if they are not under the subject’s control, ex: to fall in love).

29.  This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" (if the unalienable rights were guaranteed to the Negros they would have been able to have complete control over their lives, whereas “America defaulted on this”, therefore America is in control and has the power to deny basic rights to the Negros while the Negros still lack the control over their lives. A situation of excessive control on one hand, and total lack of it on the other still stands, therefore it is a situation negatively evaluated). It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

30.  But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults ( great has normally a positive evaluation, but in this case is used in provocative sense) of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check (it means that Negros have come to take back control on their lives, claiming the right to their undeniable human rights, therefore is positively evaluated) a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

31.  We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America (it suggests that America is not in complete control anymore, given that the Negros have now the power to remind her of her misdemeanors) of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley ( He uses the adjective desolate that has a negative evaluation to emphasize the Nigro’s situation) of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice (the expression “to make justice” is generally used in conflict situations, when one party feels discriminated or prejudiced by the other, which, therefore, is in control of the situation. This expression could be negatively evaluated if it meant “to take a revenge”, but in this case it is positively evaluated because it refers to “racial justice”. The speaker is proposing to solve racial discrimination by making justice, as to say balancing the control factor between the parties) a reality for all of God's children.

32.  It would be fatal (this seems like a threaten coming from the Negros towards America’s government. In terms of power relations: the Negros are obviously taking control back, while America seems to be losing it. On the Negros part, it is surely positively evaluated; on America’s part it has a negative outcomes, like the revolts, which are spiraling and getting out of control) for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent ( discontent has a negative evaluation, but collocated with legitimate it takes a positive evaluation: Nigros have good reasons to be angry) will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. […]