A review of research on authorial evaluation in English academic writing: A methodological perspective

Highlights

• Outlines main strands of research on evaluation according to the analytical framework.

• Sorts out major methodological approaches to evaluation in English academic writing.

• Four strands identified: the stance, the metadiscourse, the appraisal, and the voice.

• Three major approaches adopted: corpus-based, in-depth textual, and ethnographic.

• Ethnographic, diachronic, and a mingling of approaches and perspectives are appealed.

Abstract

Evaluation is pervasive in academic writing, and the past decades have witnessed a proliferation of research on writer's authorial evaluation in English academic writing. However, there is a lack of systematic review on evaluation research so far in the literature. To address this gap, this review aims to outline the major strands of research on authorial evaluation in English academic writing as well as the major methodological approaches adopted in the field of applied linguistics over the past twenty years, and to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the methodological approaches in revealing the matter. The review identified four broad strands of literature in terms of the analytical framework applied (if any): the stance strand, the metadiscourse strand, the appraisal strand, and the voice strand. Then three major methodological approaches, namely the corpus-based approach, the in-depth textual approach, and the ethnographic approach, were identified and discussed with regard to their respective strengths and drawbacks in exploring evaluative meanings in English academic writing. Implications from this review were further discussed, and methodological directions for future research were pointed out.

Introduction

Evaluation is pervasive in academic writing (Hyland, 2005), as academic writers construe evaluative meanings to help convince the readers of their epistemic knowledge claims. Evaluation addresses the interpersonal meanings of language, construing attitude, stance or point of view (e.g., Hood, 2010; Hyland & Diani, 2009), and encompasses both attitudinal features towards entities and epistemic features towards propositions (Fairclough, 2003; Gray & Biber, 2012; Thompson & Hunston, 2000). That is, evaluation is a unified concept integrating two dimensions: the attitudinal dimension which indicates speakers’/writers’ positive or negative feelings towards entities and the propositional dimension which indicates speakers’/writers’ certainty of or commitment to the propositions in terms of reliability or trueness. Therefore, following Hunston and Thompson (2000), this study defines evaluation as writers’ explicit or implicit encodings of their emotions of, viewpoints on, attitudes and positions towards entities or propositions in academic writing.

The past three decades witnessed a proliferation of studies on evaluation conducted under various headings. Generally speaking, earlier studies tended to focus on specific evaluative resources that function on either the attitudinal or the propositional dimension with the latter having received more attention. This is because epistemic meanings are “considerably more important in academic research writing than the attitudinal meanings” (Gray & Biber, 2012, p.19). For example, Ochs and Schieffelin’s (1989) study on affect is one of the rare early endeavors addressing the attitudinal dimension while the multitude of studies like intensity (e.g., Labov, 1984), modality (e.g., Palmer, 1990), hedging (e.g., Crompton, 1997) evidentiality (e.g., Chafe, 1986), and averral and attribution (e.g., Tadros, 1993) address the propositional dimension of evaluation. Among these early studies, the two lines of research on affect and evidentiality have laid particular foundation for the recent conceptions of evaluation (Gray & Biber, 2012). Affect is defined by Ochs and Schieffelin (1989) as “a broader term than emotion which includes feelings, moods, dispositions, and attitudes associated with persons and/or situations” (p. 7), which permeates the entire linguistic system at different levels such as phonological features (e.g., intonation), morpho-syntactic features (e.g., t/v pronouns signifying intimacy/distance), and discourse features (e.g., affective speech acts like teasing and apologizing). For evidentiality, Chafe (1986) defined it as any linguistic expressions of attitudes towards knowledge, and distinguished three aspects of the marking of evidentiality: the reliability of the knowledge itself on a continuum from reliable to unreliable; the mode of knowing as personal belief, hearsay, or deduction; and the source of knowledge such as evidence, the language of others, or hypotheses. Chafe found academic writers were especially concerned with how true something was and constantly indicated their assessments of the reliability of knowledge. Though these studies focused on a unilateral dimension of evaluation, they definitely have laid the groundwork for the later unified view of evaluation. Biber and Finegan (1989), for instance, brought affective and evidential meanings together into their examination of stance features, and Biber and colleagues later developed a more full-fledged analytical framework of stance, as will be discussed in Section 3.

Hunston and Thompson’s (2000) edited book Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse can be considered as a milestone for research on evaluation, in which Thompson and Hunston introduced and explicated the definitions, functions, parameters and instantiations of evaluation. Since then, there have been growing interests in examining the matter. Building on the earlier studies as discussed earlier, recent studies on authorial evaluation tend to cover both the attitudinal and propositional dimensions. Accordingly, systematic frameworks for analyzing evaluation have been developed, and research on evaluation has become even more thriving and insightful. On the other hand, however, the even more diversified array of terminologies related to evaluation in the extant literature such as stance (e.g., Conrad & Biber, 2000), metadiscourse (e.g., Hyland, 2005), appraisal (e.g., Martin & White, 2005), and voice (e.g., Matsuda, 2001) have also contributed to the growing complexity of the whole picture.

Such being the case, a systematic review of research on authorial evaluation is sorely needed, which, unfortunately, is rare so far. One reason for this scarcity lies in the daunting task of sorting the great amount of studies conducted under the great variety of headings adopting different methodological approaches. To fill in the gap, this study aims to first disentangle the complicated literature on authorial evaluation in English academic writing and identify the major strands of research in the field of applied linguistics over the past twenty years, and then focus on the methodological issue and outline the major methodological approaches adopted in the literature. Specifically, this study addresses the following questions: What are the major strands of research on authorial evaluation in English academic writing? What are the major methodological approaches to authorial evaluation in English academic writing? And what are the respective strengths and weaknesses of the methodological approaches in revealing authorial evaluation in English academic writing? It is hoped that this review will provide implications for future research on evaluation in English academic writing.