Exploring evaluative, emotive and persuasive strategies in discourse. AAVV

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СКАЧАТЬ since in the texts studied here it mostly expresses speculative predictions, as in (21), rather than ‘safe’ predictions such as ‘My sister will be fifty next month’. However, will has not been signalled when it is falls under the scope of another Engagement expression; in these cases, it borrows the value of that expression. For example, will in (22) does not express Pronounce, since it falls under the scope of the weaker Estimate expression remains uncertain, and hence it has not been considered as an Engagement span.

      (21)Addressing these problems will be difficult, but not impossible. (EO_ESS_005)

      (22)But, unless the proper policies to nurture job growth are put in place, it remains uncertain whether demand for labor will continue to grow as technology marches forward. (EO_ ESS_009)

      The remainder of Section 5 will concern two basic kinds of problems, treated in 5.1. and 5.2., respectively. The first concerns a number of linguistic devices that lie in between two subcategories of Engagement; the second pertains to the boundaries between Engagement and Attitude.

      5.1 DOUBTFUL CASES BETWEEN TWO SUBCATEGORIES OF ENGAGEMENT

      There are many cases in which a source of evidence is cited, but the way in which it is cited does not give explicit indications about the writer’s degree of commitment, so they could be classified under either of the two subcategories of Attribute (Acknowledge and Distance) or under Endorse. A typical example of these ambivalent expressions are English according to and its Spanish equivalents de acuerdo con and según. In order to determine the writer’s attitude towards the source, the reliability (prestige or authority) of the source and the text as a whole have been considered. For example, the expression starting with según in (23) has been classified as Acknowledge, since another study is cited next and the writer does not show full commitment to either, while in (24), which belongs to the same text, the prestige of the source has motivated its classification as Endorse.

      (23)Según un cálculo, a nivel mundial las mujeres ocupan alrededor del 24% de los puestos ejecutivos superiores. (STrans_ ESS_004)

      English original: ‘By one estimate, women hold about 24% of top management positions globally’ (EO_ESS_004)

      (24)Según datos del Foro Económico Mundial, hay una correlación importante entre los avances de un país en cuanto a cerrar la brecha entre los géneros – particularmente en educación y fuerza laboral – y su competitividad económica. (STrans_ ESS_004)

      English original: WEF [World Economic Forum] data suggest a strong correlation between a country’s progress in closing the gender gap – particularly in education and the labor force – and its economic competitiveness. (EO_ESS_004)

      Knowledge of the world may also play a role in expressions with the source cited. We know that Marco Polo’s appreciation of geography and raw materials was invaluable in his time but is now completely outdated. Consequently, the italicised expression in (25) has been classified as Distance:

      (25)Out of Marco Polo’s sparkling pages leaped all the good things of creation: there were nearly 13,000 islands in the Indian seas, with mountains of gold and pearls and twelve kinds of spices in enormous quantities, in addition to an abundance of white and black pepper. (ETrans_EXP_003)

      5.2 OVERLAPPING CASES BETWEEN ENGAGEMENT AND OTHER APPRAISAL CATEGORIES

      This section covers cases in which there are arguments for considering the linguistic devices as instances of both Engagement and Attitude.⁵ The most remarkable overlapping cases are those that express uncertainty tinged with emotion, called ‘apprehension’ in Lichtenberk (1995) (see also Lavid et al. 2016, 2017). An expression of this kind is one hopes that in (26). These cases have the feeling component of Affect and the reasoning component of Engagement (Carretero 2014: 72). I have opted for including these cases as Estimate.

      (26)One hopes that those who understand the economics of debt and austerity, and who believe in democracy and humane values, will prevail. Whether they will remains to be seen. (EO_ESS_001)

      In other cases, Engagement was difficult to disentangle from Graduation, the main reason being that both categories concern the strengthening or weakening of assertiveness. In particular, certain adverbs that emphasise the extent to which the information is true, such as largely, completely or literally and their Spanish equivalents, belong to Focus: Sharpen but they have a similar effect to expressions of certainty such as certainly or undoubtedly, classified as Pronounce.⁶ This distinction has been maintained, thus keeping the two kinds of adverbs separate.

6 A Comparative Analysis of the Engagement Options in the Expository and Argumentative Texts

      This section starts with a global characterisation of the Engagement expressions in all the texts, and then shows the results drawn from the comparisons in the three ways stated in Section 4: the English versus the Spanish texts, the original texts in the two languages, and argumentative versus expository texts. In all the cases, the significance of the differences was subjected to the chi-square test and, according to what is common practice in social science research, the difference was considered to be significant if the p value equalled or was smaller than 0.05.

      6.1 A GLOBAL CHARACTERISATION OF THE ENGAGEMENT EXPRESSIONS IN ALL THE TEXTS

      The distribution of the Engagement expressions in all the texts by categories is given in Table 2. Considering that the total number of words is approximately 40,000 words and that the total number of expressions is 1,860, the normalised frequency is 46.5 Engagement expressions per thousand words. Not surprisingly, the Contraction expressions double those of Expansion, due to the high frequency of the two categories under Disclaim: expressing negation or presenting the truth of a proposition as contrary to expectations are common devices in the use of language in general. The difference between Expansion and Contraction is even greater in the two categories of Cited expression categories, where Contraction exactly quadruples Expansion. Within Entertain, the most common category is Estimate, followed by Speculate, while Opine is almost non-existent: the authors did not adopt dialogic positions that indicated possibility for different individual judgements. In its turn, Attribute displays a higher frequency of Distance than of Acknowledge. Within Contraction, the distribution among the three types is roughly balanced, Pronounce and Concur being the most and the least common, respectively.

Table 2. Distribution of the Engagement spans in all the texts

	No.	%
TOTAL NUMBER	1860	100
EXPANSION	562	30.22
CONTRACTION	1186	63.76
CITED-EXPANSION	60	3.23
CITED-CONTRACTION	52	2.80
EXPANSION
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