Volume 39, Issue 3 -

In this article, I explore clichés as socio-cognitive resources that enable the expression of attitudinal positioning in interaction. I examine a corpus of 150 clichés collected from a variety of publicly available sources and illustrate their function by exploring how they are used to convey evaluation in institutional meetings. By co-deploying the attitude system of the appraisal framework with socio-cognitive discourse analysis tools, I argue that clichés can be used to provoke evaluation through the socio-cognitive resources they evoke given the shared knowledge contained within them. The findings indicate that the majority of evaluative instances relate to performance or ability of human entities by reference to basic aspects of human experience contained in the socio-cognitive representations evoked. The article also finds that the provoked attitudinal values work in a cumulative way to create a flow of evaluative patterns, which, in turn, contributes to our understanding of the interpersonal function they perform, i.e. persuade, urge action and save face. The paper argues that the co-deployment of both approaches allows the investigation of clichés as resources for covertly expressing evaluation by reference to knowledge shared by the interlocutors.

Texts are products of systemic functional choices determined by contextual factors . To analyze how the context affects writers’ lexico-grammatical choices, this paper attempts to study ditransitive patterns in the research article genre across medical science and sociology, a choice explained by the gap in the literature of genre analysis of ditransitivity. To this end, ditransitive patterns are quantified in a corpus of 245 academic articles from medical science and sociology published in 2011. The analysis shows that the object–prepositional object pattern dominates both disciplines, which can be explained by its being a compactness device enabling writers to observe the communicative functions of the research article genre. Across the two disciplines, the higher frequency of clausal patterns in sociology than medical science reveals the explicitness and persuasiveness of writers in sociology, which may be attributed to the different research methods, and the nature of knowledge accumulation in each discipline. These findings lead to the conclusion that the choices of ditransitive patterns are determined by the generic features of the research article genre and disciplinary specificities, though they are also influenced by the different research topics across disciplines and the category-selectional properties of ditransitives.

The article discusses self-quotations as a strategy of politeness. I maintain that self-quotations fulfill strategies of linguistic politeness, and that the fulfillment of these strategies must be understood through the discourse event standing in the background of the self-quotation. In the corpus – 13 Hebrew articles written by women in eastern Europe in the nineteenth century – 35 self-quotations were found. All of them are “fictional”, i.e. they do not refer to an actual discourse event that occurred in the past. Nevertheless, the fictionality is not identical in all the cases examined, and it arises from the specific characteristics of each case. The examination of the construction of the other discourse event (past, future, or fictional) reveals that it strongly influences the quotation’s pragmatic function, and specifically its “polite” character. The discourse event might be a speech or thought event; it might actually have occurred in the past or only be implied by a future tense or a conditional structure; or sometimes it may be openly declared as a discourse event that will not take place altogether. Self-quotations function as hedging devices, qualifying various aspects of the utterance – its illocutionary force, comprehensiveness, the degree of social authority it expresses, or the act of uttering itself.

This study, set in a discourse-analytical and constructionist framework, explores the impact of biomedical advances on language and discourse. The main focus is on surrogacy and on the websites of ten organizations promoting it, with headquarters in various countries where this practice is legal. The discursive representation of the different forms of surrogacy and related Assisted Reproductive Technologies is discussed, focusing in particular on the communicative strategies enacted to deal with the most sensitive and controversial aspects. The analysis provides evidence of an approach that represents surrogacy, the actors and the moral issues involved in absolutely positive terms, and at the same time disregards the most problematic and controversial aspects, making recourse to some recurrent discursive frames. A further aspect investigated is the representation and denomination of the various actors involved, in a context where the spread of new reproductive technologies has introduced the possibility of significantly altering the natural mechanisms presiding over the inception of human life, and has thus triggered a process of lexical innovation and adaptation of the basic vocabulary associated with reproduction and kinship roles.

The main aim of this article is to study the communicative functions of visual metonymies in a sample of picture books written and illustrated by Anthony Browne, an internationally acclaimed author and illustrator of children’s books. The three tales selected for analysis are Voices in the Park, Gorilla and Piggybook, all of which have been highly praised by critics and become universally accepted as classics. Within the frameworks of visual social semiotics and cognitive linguistics, the strategies available to the illustrator to represent characters in picture books have been identified and analysed in the contexts where they were produced. The results of the analysis show that visual metonymies are used in Browne’s picture books essentially to highlight or minimize a character’s status over another fictional actor, to ascribe negative qualities or attitudes to the main characters and, in turn, to foreshadow what is yet to come in the story.

This study takes a lexical-grammatical approach to exploring the evaluation of human behaviour and/or character. It uses adjective complementation patterns as the starting point to examine the lexical-grammatical resources at risk in the appraisal system of judgement , aiming to explore the extent to which we can arrive at the same categorization of the resources realizing judgement if a formal or lexical-grammatical approach, rather than a discourse-semantic one, is taken. Using a corpus compiled of texts categorized as ‘Biography’ in the British National Corpus, the study, on the one hand, shows that most of the items identified can be very satisfactorily classified in terms posited in the judgement system, suggesting that the nomenclature from that model is useful. On the other hand, a considerable number of items have also been identified which construe attitudes towards emotional types of personality traits, leading to the proposal of a potentially useful new judgement category and further an adjusted system of judgement . The heuristic potential of aligning the lexical-grammatical and discourse-semantic approaches to appraisal is further discussed.