Towards a Typology of Evaluation in Parliamentary debate: From theory to Practice –and back again

The topic of this forthcoming volume of Textus is indeed timely, and, for me, quite exciting, as it provides an opportunity for taking stock of nearly 7 years of corpus-assisted research into speaker evaluation and stance in the specialized discourse of parliamentary debate – a major site of highly indeterminate rhetorical struggles for ideological, culture-encoding meaning-ascendancy. The vital research question has consistently been: how to determine and marshal the heterogeneous ways of saying, and thus of meaning, that can be seen to construe, in and across corpora of such texts, speaker orientation to both the subject matter being deliberately debated and to other conflicting or concurring co-textual and/ or inter-textual voices. The problematics involved in examining multiple sets of events collectively, rather than as single texts, are of course manifold. In the first place, one comes up against the largely accepted premise that interpreting what may be at stake evaluatively/ interpersonally/ rhetorically, in any given textual instance, cannot easily be done ‘automatically’ – i.e., both context and co-text count. Secondly, as Biber et al. (1998: 106) make disturbingly clear, context-rooted, full-text discourse studies “[…] are not typically corpus-based […]”, and obviously for sound reasons. Despite such objective dilemmas, it is possible I propose to ‘shunt’ (Halliday 1961, in 2002: 45), from clause, or concordance, to text, and even to intertext (for an application to another functional variety of text, see Miller, in Thompson & Hunston, 2006). My work has been consistently carried out within the APPRAISAL SYSTEMS framework (Martin 2000; Martin & Rose 2003, chapt. 2; White 2003a, 2003b; Martin & White 2005), and especially with reference to the ENGAGEMENT SYSTEM, which is concerned with how intersubjective relations of alignment and dis-alignment are linguistically construed, negotiated and made rhetorically functional by means of wordings that have been analysed under comparable headings in alternative frameworks, including modality, polarity, evidentiality, hedging, intensification, concession, attribution, consequentiality and metadiscursivity (see, e.g., Labov 1972 & 1984; Biber and Finnegan 1988 & 1989; Chafe 1986; Hyland 1996). One significant merit of Engagement theory is its insistence that we analysts rigorously account for semantic conflict by ‘getting at’ the cultural assumptions responsible for our categorizations of just what’s at stake – a ticklish task indeed. In this paper I will show how these systems, the modelling of which cannot even now be said to be definitively concluded, provide an explicit and delicate semantics and grammatics of speaker, as well as reader, positioning – one that has provided a taxonomy increasingly fit for both analysis and description of the myriad variety of evaluative mechanisms employed in this specialized register. A further aim, however, is to map the ways in which my own work with the systems (see, e.g., Miller 2002a, 2002b, 2004a, 2004b, 2006) has been privileged to feed back into their evolution in a constructive way (Martin & White 2005: 260), in particular by contributing to the development of the instantiation cline proposed by Martin & White (2005: 164), which focuses on patterns of use associated with register-specific rhetorical objectives and authorial personae construction. To this end, proposals regarding additional resources of evaluation and stance emerging from my findings, but still not accommodated in the model, will also be put forward.