Linguistic research has recently focused on the possibly ‘register-idiosyncratic’ (Miller & Johnson, 2009) significance of lexical bundles/clusters. Biber & Conrad (1999) examine these in conversation and academic prose; others, such as Partington & Morley (2004), look at how patterns of metaphorical lexical bundles might mark the expression of ideology in newspaper editorials and news reports; Goźdź-Roszkowski (2006) classifies lexical bundles in legal discourse; Morley (2004) examines their evaluative discourse-marking function in newspaper editorials. Yet, despite “[…] the important correlation between lexicogrammatical choice and register […] It is also an observable fact that certain systemic choices strongly influence others at a more local level and irrespective of register variety.” (Tucker 2006: 963). In addition, at the extra-linguistic level, as Hasan reminds us, “[…] contexts of life cannot but be permeable’ (Hasan 2000: 43). In other words, the possibility of phraseology not being ‘register-idiosyncratic’ must also be kept in mind. The proposed paper will report select findings of our investigation into ‘probabilistic’ (Halliday 1990; 1991) evaluative and speaker-positioning function bundles (Halliday 1985), viewed as realizations of semantic paradigms (Halliday 1984), in the sub-variety of political discourse: US congressional speech. The study continues long-ongoing investigation into register-idiosyncratic features of evaluation and stance in institutional deliberative debate (cf. Miller 2007), with register being “[…] defined as the local resetting of the global probabilities of the system” (Halliday 1998), due to situation-specific conditionalization (Matthiessen 1993), and focus being on “[…] what choices in meaning call on what features in the grammar for their realization” (Halliday 1984).Our approach to register variation assumes a probabilistic system with register skewings and hypothesises that the skewing of this register is motivated by differences in ‘registorial repertoires’ (Matthiessen 1993) marking the ways debaters interact and discursively position themselves vis-à-vis one another in the course of ‘deliberate dispute’ (Adams 1999). That is, we see such skewing as being related to tenor-oriented interpersonal prosodies (Martin 1992). Thus variations according to gender, ethnicity and political party affiliation are also probed. Our corpus of nearly 1.5 million words consists of speeches on the homogeneous topic of the Iraq war, compiled from the transcribed sessions of the US House of Representatives (HoR) for the year 2003. Methodologically, and in the wake of Hunston (2004), our study begins with a ‘text’: a randomly chosen 1-minute speech, whose evaluative patterns, analysed with the appraisal systems model (Martin and White 2005), serve as the basis for subsequent, comparative, corpus-assisted investigation, using primarily Wordsmith Tools 4.0 (Scott 2004), ConcGram 1.0 (Greaves 2009) and Xaira (Burnard & Todd s.a.). The chapter provides results of co-textual analysis in the environment of nodes must (n’t/ not). Our approach can be described as ‘2-pronged’ (Matthiessen 1993), i.e., as combining two principled selections as a way of moving towards an at least partial interpretation of evaluative patterns in this register. These are: 1) a lexicogrammatical ‘slice’ – i.e., the expanded instances of the phraseologies themselves – with metafunctional and axial coverage, and, 2) an instantial slice, providing as full an account as possible of all text passages (or, where too numerous, a substantially representative sample of the total proportions). Clearly posited is that corpora can usefully be used to ‘shunt’ (Halliday 1961), from clause, or concordance line, to text, and also intertext, using the corpus as a kind of ‘echo-chamber’ (Thompson & Hunston, 2006). In short, interpreting ‘choice’ occurs at different levels. But as Halliday also points out (1994: xvi), even what is typically the preliminary step, at the level of grammar “[…] is already a work of interpretation”. And it is a necessary, an essential step. As Matthiessen reminds us (1993. 279), “[…] register analysis is inherently comparative”. Although our aim is not only to compare these phraseologies across registers, we look at frequencies in diverse corpora of similar and different registers to better interpret the incidence of features in our own. Results are thus tested against general corpora of English (British National Corpus; Corpus of Contemporary American English), the House of Commons corpus compiled for the same period and topic, and various other smaller UK and US political corpora. Moreover, in an effort at excluding field-determined/subject matter skewing of our findings, we also contrast figures in the complete 2003 HoR sessions, comprising non-war-related material as well. Aims centre on seeing: 1) whether the patterns, viewed as instantiations of probabilities of the system’s potential in this register, do prove statistically ‘salient’; 2) how the semantic prosodies enacted in the congressional corpus compare to that in the reference corpora; 3) whether, as has emerged in past studies, these patterns can be seen to be, typically, not only multiple, but also densely intertwined and interdependent; 4) to what extent evaluative distinctions may depend on who is doing the appraising (e.g., on variations in gender, ethnicity and political party affiliation) and on what, concretely, is being appraised and, 5) the degree to which these ways of saying/meaning may be always already ideologically, and so attitudinally, saturated (White, list posting - AppraisalAnalysis@yahoogroups.com - 14 January 2005), and so ‘primed’, in Hoey-esque terms, to appraise in certain ways. Despite the fact that corpus-assisted methodology allows us to aim at register synthesis (Matthiessen 1993), rather than too fine-grained register analysis, our goals are vast and so the research, indisputably, labour-intensive and time-consuming. Be that as it may, we believe that the cumulative results of these rigorous studies can be said to add to the growing typology of resources for evaluation and intersubjective positioning in this register, and so also to contribute to the development of the Cline of Instantiation, with specific reference to ‘key’ and ‘stance’ (Martin & White 2005). If findings also prove ‘fuzzy’ at times, so be it. As Halliday puts it: “Systemic grammatics is not uncomfortable with fuzziness. [...] it is an essential property that a grammatics must have if it is to have any value for intelligent computing (1996, our emphasis). Cited References: Adams K. (1999) ‘Deliberate Dispute and the Construction of Oppositional Stance’, Pragmatics 9 (2), 231-248. Biber D. & Conrad S (1999) ‘Lexical bundles in conversation and academic prose’, in Hasselgard, H. & S. Oksefjell (eds), Out of Corpora, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 181-190. Burnard L and T. Todd, Xaira 1.25 (current release), Oxford: OUCS. Goźdź-Roszkowski S. (2006) ‘Frequent Phraseology in Contractual Instruments’, in Gotti M. & D.S. Giannoni (eds), New Trends in Specialized Discourse Analysis. Bern: Peter Lang, 147-161. Greaves C. (2009) ConcGram 1.0 A phraseological search engine, Amsterdam: John Benjamins **Halliday M.A.K (1961) ‘Categories of the Theory of Grammar’, in Word, 17(3), 241-292. **Halliday M.A.K. (1984) ‘On the ineffability of grammatical categories’, in Manning A., P. Martin & K. McCalla (eds), The Tenth LACUS Forum, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 3-18. **Halliday M.A.K (1985) ‘Dimensions of Discourse Analysis: Grammar’, in The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Vol. 2: Dimensions of Discourse, London: Academic Press, 29-56. **Halliday M.A.K (1990) ‘New ways of meaning: the challenge to applied linguistics’, Journal of Applied Linguistics 6 (Ninth World Congress of Applied Linguistics Special Issue), Greek Applied Linguistics Association, 7-36; also in 1992, Putz M. (ed.), Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 59-95. **Halliday M.A.K (1991) ‘Corpus studies and probabilistic grammar’, in Aijamer K. & B. Altenberg (eds), English Corpus Linguistics: Studies in Honour of Jan Svartvik, London & NY: Longman, 30-43. Halliday M.A.K (1996) ‘On grammar and grammatics’, in Hasan R., C. Cloran & D. Butt (eds), Functional Descriptions: Theory and Practice, Amsterdam & Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 1-38. **Halliday M.A.K. (1998) ‘Grammar and daily life: concurrence and complementarity’, in van Dijk T.A. (ed), Functional approaches to language, culture and cognition, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 221-237. Hasan, R. (2000) ‘The uses of talk’, in Sarangi S. & M. Coulthard (eds), Discourse and Social Life, London, Longman, 28-47. Hoey M. (2005) Lexical Priming, Abingdon: Routledge. Hunston S. (2004) ‘Counting the uncountable: Problems of identifying evaluation in a text and in a corpus’, in Partington A., J. Morley, L. Haarman (eds), Corpora and Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang, 157-188. Martin J.R. (1992) English Text, System and Structure, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Martin J.R. & White P.R.R (2005) The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Matthiessen C. (1993) “Register in the Round”, in Ghadessy M. (ed), Register Analysis: Theory and Practice, London: Pinter, 221-291. Miller D.R. (2007) ‘Towards a Typology of Evaluation in Parliamentary debate: From theory to Practice – and back again’, in Dossena M. & A. Jucker (eds.), (Re)volutions in Evaluation: Textus XX n.1, 159-180. Miller D.R & Johnson J. H., (2009) ‘Evaluation, speaker-hearer positioning and the Iraq war: A corpus-assisted study of Congressional argument’, in Morley J. & P. Bayley, Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq Conflict: Wording the War, London: Routledge, 34-73. Morley J. (2004) ‘The Sting in the Tail: Persuasion in English Editorial Discourse’, in Partington A., J. Morley, L. Haarman (eds), Corpora and Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang, 239-255. Murphy A. & Morley J. (2006) ‘The peroration revisited’, in Bhatia V.K. & M. Gotti (eds) Explorations in specialized genres, Bern: Peter Lang, 201-215. Partington, A. & Morley, J. (2004). ‘At the heart of ideology: word and cluster/bundle frequency in political debate’, in Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk B. (ed), Practical Applications in Language and Computers, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 179-192. Scott, M. (2004) Wordsmith Tools 4.0 Oxford: OUP Thompson G. & S. Hunston (eds) (2006) System and Corpus: Exploring Connections, London: Equinox. Tucker G. (2006) ‘Between lexis and grammar: Towards a systemic functional approach to phraseology’, in Matthiessen C., R. Hasan and J. Webster, Continuing Discourse on Language: A Functional Perspective, London: Equinox, 953-977. **Halliday 1961, 1984, 1985 and 1998 are published in the collected works of M.A.K. Halliday, Webster J.J. (ed.), Vol. 1: On Grammar, , London and NY: Continuum, respectively at pages 37-94, 291-322; 261-286; and 369-383, while Halliday 1990 is reproduced in Vol. 3, On Language and Linguistics, 139-174.
‘Register-idiosyncratic’ evaluative choice in Congressional debate: a corpus assisted comparative study / DONNA ROSE MILLER; Jane Helen Johnson. - STAMPA. - (2013), pp. 20.432-20.453. [10.1017/CBO9781139583077.026]
‘Register-idiosyncratic’ evaluative choice in Congressional debate: a corpus assisted comparative study
MILLER, DONNA ROSE;JOHNSON, JANE HELEN
2013
Abstract
Linguistic research has recently focused on the possibly ‘register-idiosyncratic’ (Miller & Johnson, 2009) significance of lexical bundles/clusters. Biber & Conrad (1999) examine these in conversation and academic prose; others, such as Partington & Morley (2004), look at how patterns of metaphorical lexical bundles might mark the expression of ideology in newspaper editorials and news reports; Goźdź-Roszkowski (2006) classifies lexical bundles in legal discourse; Morley (2004) examines their evaluative discourse-marking function in newspaper editorials. Yet, despite “[…] the important correlation between lexicogrammatical choice and register […] It is also an observable fact that certain systemic choices strongly influence others at a more local level and irrespective of register variety.” (Tucker 2006: 963). In addition, at the extra-linguistic level, as Hasan reminds us, “[…] contexts of life cannot but be permeable’ (Hasan 2000: 43). In other words, the possibility of phraseology not being ‘register-idiosyncratic’ must also be kept in mind. The proposed paper will report select findings of our investigation into ‘probabilistic’ (Halliday 1990; 1991) evaluative and speaker-positioning function bundles (Halliday 1985), viewed as realizations of semantic paradigms (Halliday 1984), in the sub-variety of political discourse: US congressional speech. The study continues long-ongoing investigation into register-idiosyncratic features of evaluation and stance in institutional deliberative debate (cf. Miller 2007), with register being “[…] defined as the local resetting of the global probabilities of the system” (Halliday 1998), due to situation-specific conditionalization (Matthiessen 1993), and focus being on “[…] what choices in meaning call on what features in the grammar for their realization” (Halliday 1984).Our approach to register variation assumes a probabilistic system with register skewings and hypothesises that the skewing of this register is motivated by differences in ‘registorial repertoires’ (Matthiessen 1993) marking the ways debaters interact and discursively position themselves vis-à-vis one another in the course of ‘deliberate dispute’ (Adams 1999). That is, we see such skewing as being related to tenor-oriented interpersonal prosodies (Martin 1992). Thus variations according to gender, ethnicity and political party affiliation are also probed. Our corpus of nearly 1.5 million words consists of speeches on the homogeneous topic of the Iraq war, compiled from the transcribed sessions of the US House of Representatives (HoR) for the year 2003. Methodologically, and in the wake of Hunston (2004), our study begins with a ‘text’: a randomly chosen 1-minute speech, whose evaluative patterns, analysed with the appraisal systems model (Martin and White 2005), serve as the basis for subsequent, comparative, corpus-assisted investigation, using primarily Wordsmith Tools 4.0 (Scott 2004), ConcGram 1.0 (Greaves 2009) and Xaira (Burnard & Todd s.a.). The chapter provides results of co-textual analysis in the environment of nodes must (n’t/ not). Our approach can be described as ‘2-pronged’ (Matthiessen 1993), i.e., as combining two principled selections as a way of moving towards an at least partial interpretation of evaluative patterns in this register. These are: 1) a lexicogrammatical ‘slice’ – i.e., the expanded instances of the phraseologies themselves – with metafunctional and axial coverage, and, 2) an instantial slice, providing as full an account as possible of all text passages (or, where too numerous, a substantially representative sample of the total proportions). Clearly posited is that corpora can usefully be used to ‘shunt’ (Halliday 1961), from clause, or concordance line, to text, and also intertext, using the corpus as a kind of ‘echo-chamber’ (Thompson & Hunston, 2006). In short, interpreting ‘choice’ occurs at different levels. But as Halliday also points out (1994: xvi), even what is typically the preliminary step, at the level of grammar “[…] is already a work of interpretation”. And it is a necessary, an essential step. As Matthiessen reminds us (1993. 279), “[…] register analysis is inherently comparative”. Although our aim is not only to compare these phraseologies across registers, we look at frequencies in diverse corpora of similar and different registers to better interpret the incidence of features in our own. Results are thus tested against general corpora of English (British National Corpus; Corpus of Contemporary American English), the House of Commons corpus compiled for the same period and topic, and various other smaller UK and US political corpora. Moreover, in an effort at excluding field-determined/subject matter skewing of our findings, we also contrast figures in the complete 2003 HoR sessions, comprising non-war-related material as well. Aims centre on seeing: 1) whether the patterns, viewed as instantiations of probabilities of the system’s potential in this register, do prove statistically ‘salient’; 2) how the semantic prosodies enacted in the congressional corpus compare to that in the reference corpora; 3) whether, as has emerged in past studies, these patterns can be seen to be, typically, not only multiple, but also densely intertwined and interdependent; 4) to what extent evaluative distinctions may depend on who is doing the appraising (e.g., on variations in gender, ethnicity and political party affiliation) and on what, concretely, is being appraised and, 5) the degree to which these ways of saying/meaning may be always already ideologically, and so attitudinally, saturated (White, list posting - AppraisalAnalysis@yahoogroups.com - 14 January 2005), and so ‘primed’, in Hoey-esque terms, to appraise in certain ways. Despite the fact that corpus-assisted methodology allows us to aim at register synthesis (Matthiessen 1993), rather than too fine-grained register analysis, our goals are vast and so the research, indisputably, labour-intensive and time-consuming. Be that as it may, we believe that the cumulative results of these rigorous studies can be said to add to the growing typology of resources for evaluation and intersubjective positioning in this register, and so also to contribute to the development of the Cline of Instantiation, with specific reference to ‘key’ and ‘stance’ (Martin & White 2005). If findings also prove ‘fuzzy’ at times, so be it. As Halliday puts it: “Systemic grammatics is not uncomfortable with fuzziness. [...] it is an essential property that a grammatics must have if it is to have any value for intelligent computing (1996, our emphasis). Cited References: Adams K. (1999) ‘Deliberate Dispute and the Construction of Oppositional Stance’, Pragmatics 9 (2), 231-248. Biber D. & Conrad S (1999) ‘Lexical bundles in conversation and academic prose’, in Hasselgard, H. & S. Oksefjell (eds), Out of Corpora, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 181-190. Burnard L and T. Todd, Xaira 1.25 (current release), Oxford: OUCS. Goźdź-Roszkowski S. (2006) ‘Frequent Phraseology in Contractual Instruments’, in Gotti M. & D.S. Giannoni (eds), New Trends in Specialized Discourse Analysis. Bern: Peter Lang, 147-161. Greaves C. (2009) ConcGram 1.0 A phraseological search engine, Amsterdam: John Benjamins **Halliday M.A.K (1961) ‘Categories of the Theory of Grammar’, in Word, 17(3), 241-292. **Halliday M.A.K. (1984) ‘On the ineffability of grammatical categories’, in Manning A., P. Martin & K. McCalla (eds), The Tenth LACUS Forum, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 3-18. **Halliday M.A.K (1985) ‘Dimensions of Discourse Analysis: Grammar’, in The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Vol. 2: Dimensions of Discourse, London: Academic Press, 29-56. **Halliday M.A.K (1990) ‘New ways of meaning: the challenge to applied linguistics’, Journal of Applied Linguistics 6 (Ninth World Congress of Applied Linguistics Special Issue), Greek Applied Linguistics Association, 7-36; also in 1992, Putz M. (ed.), Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 59-95. **Halliday M.A.K (1991) ‘Corpus studies and probabilistic grammar’, in Aijamer K. & B. Altenberg (eds), English Corpus Linguistics: Studies in Honour of Jan Svartvik, London & NY: Longman, 30-43. Halliday M.A.K (1996) ‘On grammar and grammatics’, in Hasan R., C. Cloran & D. Butt (eds), Functional Descriptions: Theory and Practice, Amsterdam & Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 1-38. **Halliday M.A.K. (1998) ‘Grammar and daily life: concurrence and complementarity’, in van Dijk T.A. (ed), Functional approaches to language, culture and cognition, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 221-237. Hasan, R. (2000) ‘The uses of talk’, in Sarangi S. & M. Coulthard (eds), Discourse and Social Life, London, Longman, 28-47. Hoey M. (2005) Lexical Priming, Abingdon: Routledge. Hunston S. (2004) ‘Counting the uncountable: Problems of identifying evaluation in a text and in a corpus’, in Partington A., J. Morley, L. Haarman (eds), Corpora and Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang, 157-188. Martin J.R. (1992) English Text, System and Structure, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Martin J.R. & White P.R.R (2005) The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Matthiessen C. (1993) “Register in the Round”, in Ghadessy M. (ed), Register Analysis: Theory and Practice, London: Pinter, 221-291. Miller D.R. (2007) ‘Towards a Typology of Evaluation in Parliamentary debate: From theory to Practice – and back again’, in Dossena M. & A. Jucker (eds.), (Re)volutions in Evaluation: Textus XX n.1, 159-180. Miller D.R & Johnson J. H., (2009) ‘Evaluation, speaker-hearer positioning and the Iraq war: A corpus-assisted study of Congressional argument’, in Morley J. & P. Bayley, Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq Conflict: Wording the War, London: Routledge, 34-73. Morley J. (2004) ‘The Sting in the Tail: Persuasion in English Editorial Discourse’, in Partington A., J. Morley, L. Haarman (eds), Corpora and Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang, 239-255. Murphy A. & Morley J. (2006) ‘The peroration revisited’, in Bhatia V.K. & M. Gotti (eds) Explorations in specialized genres, Bern: Peter Lang, 201-215. Partington, A. & Morley, J. (2004). ‘At the heart of ideology: word and cluster/bundle frequency in political debate’, in Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk B. (ed), Practical Applications in Language and Computers, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 179-192. Scott, M. (2004) Wordsmith Tools 4.0 Oxford: OUP Thompson G. & S. Hunston (eds) (2006) System and Corpus: Exploring Connections, London: Equinox. Tucker G. (2006) ‘Between lexis and grammar: Towards a systemic functional approach to phraseology’, in Matthiessen C., R. Hasan and J. Webster, Continuing Discourse on Language: A Functional Perspective, London: Equinox, 953-977. **Halliday 1961, 1984, 1985 and 1998 are published in the collected works of M.A.K. Halliday, Webster J.J. (ed.), Vol. 1: On Grammar, , London and NY: Continuum, respectively at pages 37-94, 291-322; 261-286; and 369-383, while Halliday 1990 is reproduced in Vol. 3, On Language and Linguistics, 139-174.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
