The appraisal framework, corpus linguistics and issues in contrastive linguistics, translation studies and global English

In this presentation I will explore how the appraisal framework (Martin and White 2005), in combination with corpus linguistic techniques, can provide new insights into similarities and differences in evaluative meaning-making potential both across languages and across different registers and social-dialects within languages. For the paper I will focus on evaluative meanings in texts which have certain points of significant similarity, for example, multiple translations of the same source texts, news reports of the same incident written in different types of global English, and so on. I will outline and analyse methodologies which make it possible to reach more systematic and theoretically principled conclusions with regards to what is at stake communicatively when, for example, different translators of the same text produce different translations of source text evaluative meanings, or when journalists writing in one global English use evaluative terms not available in another global English. (For example, in Indian English-language journalism, the term “top-gun” – as in “he’s a top-gun manager” – is entirely positive attitudinally, while in British/Australian English it has negative connotations.).More specifically, the paper will explore how fine-grained comparisons of the evaluative meanings in closely related texts can be developed in terms of the positively/negatively attitudinal meanings being advanced, and the ways in which the authors/speakers position themselves vis-à-vis prior speakers on the same topic or potential respondents to the current proposition. This will provide for conclusions as to what Munday has termed “critical points” in translation (Munday 2012) and what the anthropologist Michael Agar has termed cultural “rich points”, defined as “locations in discourse where major cultural differences are signalled” (Agar 1994: 232, cited in Munday 2012).