Exploring evaluative, emotive and persuasive strategies in discourse. AAVV

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СКАЧАТЬ the second hypothesis, namely that a comparison including only the original texts in both languages would show greater differences: the English and Spanish essays would tend to favour the use of language-specific preferred devices. The third hypothesis was that the distribution of Engagement expressions would differ depending on text type: Contraction expressions could well be more numerous in the argumentative texts, since the writer has a greater need than in expository texts to defend his/her position against other possible alternatives; by contrast, Expansion devices might well be more common in the expository texts to signal limitations of the present state of knowledge. These hypotheses will be tested by comparing the data in the ways specified in Section 4.

4 The Data, Software and Method

      The texts analysed here were extracted from the MULTINOT corpus, which consists of original and translated texts in both directions and is designed as a multifunctional resource to be used in different disciplines, such as corpus-based contrastive linguistics, translation studies, machine translation, computer-assisted translation and terminology extraction. The MULTINOT corpus, described in more detail in Lavid et al. (2015), includes a wide range of registers from the written mode, following typologies used in other parallel corpus projects, such as the DPC corpus (Paulussen et al. 2013) and the CroCo Corpus (Hansen-Schirra et al. 2012). The registers included are the following: novels and short stories; news reporting articles; manuals and legal documents from webpages; official speeches and proceedings of parliamentary debates; annual reports and letters of self-presentation of companies, promotion and advertising brochures; scientific texts; essays; and popular science expository texts.

      The data chosen for analysis were 40 texts belonging to the last two categories: 20 essays and 20 popular science expository texts. The essays were written in the 2000’s, and the expository texts from 1980 onwards. The texts were also evenly divided according to the criteria of language (20 English and 20 Spanish) and originality (20 are original texts, and 20 are their translations).

      The references and URLs of all the texts are specified in the Appendix. The argumentative texts are political essays on economics; the English originals were extracted from the non-profit international organisation Project Syndicate, which publishes and syndicates opinion articles on topics such as global affairs, economics, finance and development, and has members in many countries around the world. This organisation also provides the Spanish translations. The Spanish argumentative originals were extracted from the quality newspaper El País, and their translations were downloaded from the URL ‘Essay and science’, a webpage aimed at spreading original essays written in Spanish. The English and Spanish argumentative essays sometimes include short biographical notes about the authors. These parts were excluded from the analysis, since they lie outside the texts proper. The English and Spanish expository texts were extracted from highquality books by prestigious authors and publishers, aimed at the dissemination of knowledge in the areas of science and social science.

      Many of the texts contain 1,000 words approximately; the others were cut after the paragraph to which the 1000th word belonged, so as to maintain a balanced number of words. Therefore, the 40 texts analysed amount to approximately 40,000 words.

      The quantitative analysis was carried out with the aid of the UAM Corpus Tool, a free tool created and regularly updated by Mick O’Donnell at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.⁴ The choice of this software was due to its systemic-functional orientation, which makes it adequate for designing systems of options that serve as the basis for quantitative analyses.

      In order to test the hypotheses, a threefold comparison of the expressions of Engagement was carried out:

      a.All the English texts (originals and translations) versus all the Spanish texts;

      b.The original English texts versus the original Spanish texts;

      c.The argumentative versus the expository texts.

      While performing the analysis, a problem was posed by the expressions of Engagement attributed to other sources, cited by means of direct or indirect reported speech or in some other way, which do not reflect the writer’s dialogic position. In order to register these cases, two new categories were created: a distinction was made between the cases in which the writer subscribes to the cited source (‘Cited-Contraction’) or else does not consider it as completely reliable (‘Cited-expansion’). Each of these categories was in turn divided into Expansion and Contraction, depending on the dialogic position of the expression itself. Given the limited number of expressions of these categories, no further distinction was made between the subtypes of Expansion and Contraction. The resulting system is depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The system of Engagement used in this paper

      In order to clarify the actual signalling of the ‘Cited’ categories, let us consider (18) and (19):

      (18)El cacique Tecum, al frente de los herederos de los mayas, descabezó con su lanza el caballo de Pedro de Alvarado, convencido de que formaba parte del conquistador: Alvarado se levantó y lo mató. (SO_EXP_004)

      English translation: ‘The chief Tecum, leading the descendants of the Mayas, beheaded the horse of Pedro de Alvarado with his lance, convinced that it was part of the conquistador: Alvarado stood up and killed him.’ (ETrans_EXP_004)

      (19)For example, research finds that women tend to be less confident and less likely to negotiate for pay rises and promotions than equally qualified men. (EO_EXX_004)

      Convencido in (18) and its correlate convinced are classified as ‘Cited expansion’, since the writer does not consider the chief Tecum as a valid source of information, and the subcategory is ‘Ex-contraction’, since Tecum is portrayed as having a firm belief. By contrast, in (19) the writer expresses alignment with the cited source, research finds, and the expression less likely expresses Expansion, thus being qualified as “Cited contraction: Co-expansion”.

5 Analysis of Unclear Cases

      The system of Engagement, described in Section 2.2., provides a clear definition of subcategories and a number of sample realisations of each; however, given that the boundaries of Appraisal categories are context-dependent and inevitably not clear-cut, cases were found where categorisation was not easy. To start with, the realisations of the different categories were sometimes more complex than the standard realisations; for instance, some examples of Estimate are expressions with nouns that point to possibilities for future events to occur, as in “growth prospects are even worse” (EO_ESS_006), or “mi hipótesis de trabajo es la siguiente” (SO_ESS_004), translated as “my working hypothesis is the following” (ETrans_ ESS_004). Even a seemingly easily detectable category such as Counter, often realised by expressions such as however, although or yet, displayed instances where the realisation was rather more complex, such as (20), where the Noun Phrase headed by paradoxes indicates a contrast between a circumstance (‘in a time…’) and the rest of the proposition expressed by the that-clause.

      (20)One of the great paradoxes of our time is that workers and middle-class households continue to struggle in a time of unparalleled plenty. (EO_ESS_006)

      Another problem was posed by the modal auxiliary will referring to future time. As is well-known (a sample reference is Palmer (1990)), there is disagreement among scholars about whether it expresses a ‘pure future’ or else its modal value is maintained in all the cases. In the present study, will СКАЧАТЬ