On Attitudinal Lexis

Martin & Rose (2007: 44-5):

Here are some more examples of attitudinal lexis from Helena’s Incidents, with some suggested scales of intensity:

vivacious man     dull/placid/lively/vivacious…
pleading              ask/request/pray/beseech/plead…

Beyond this, we can also be guided by the prosody of feeling that colours a whole phase of discourse. In Helena’s narrative for example attitudinal lexis is more a feature of her Incidents than her Orientation or Interpretations. And genre is also a factor. Tutu uses less of this resource in his exposition… 

On the other hand, the Act arguably uses no attitudinal lexis at all, just as it avoids intensifiers like very.  So we can score various genres on how much amplification they are likely to display: narratives tend to amplify most, expositions less so, and administrative genres like the Act amplify very little.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Trivially, 'dull' is an antonym of 'lively' and 'vivacious'.  That is, in terms of appraisal theory, 'dull' is negative polarity, whereas 'lively' and 'vivacious' are positive.  The upscaling of a negative appraisal is another negative appraisal, not a positive appraisal; the downscaling of a positive appraisal is another positive appraisal, not a negative appraisal.

[2] As a scale of verbal Processes, this is a scale of construals of experience (ideational metafunction). Whether, as Predicators, they are used to enact intersubjective relations by appraising by means of the values of affect, appreciation or judgement is another matter.  The text in question is: Praying, pleading: 'God, what's happening?'

[3] This again mistakes lack of structure for prosodic structure.  Consider, for example, what could, by the same misunderstanding, be claimed to be the "prosody" of processes (experiential metafunction) in the above extract.

[4] This use of 'feeling' highlights a confusion that pervades this chapter: the blurring of the ideational construal of emotion with the interpersonal enactment of intersubjective relations through appraisal.

[5] Here the terms 'Incident', 'Orientation' and 'Interpretation' are identified as phases of discourse.  This is inconsistent with the theory on which this work is based (Martin 1992: 546, 558, 565-8) where such phases are located on Martin's stratum of genre, not discourse.  This is also inconsistent with Rose's claim (Sys-func 16/9/17) that phases are units on Martin's stratum of register, as recorded and critiqued here.  For reasons why neither genre nor register can be coherently modelled as either strata or context, see here (register), here (genre) and here (context).

[6] This directly contradicts the previous analysis of this text, where what were claimed to be attitudes of positive appreciation (understanding, reparation, ubuntu) and negative judgement (vengeance, retaliation, victimisation) were all realised by the choice of lexical items, rather than through choices in closed grammatical systems; see the original critique here.

[7] This remains a bare assertion until supported by empirical evidence.