From concordance to text: appraising ‘giving’ in Alma Mater donation requests

This paper examines the contextualized discursive construction of writer/reader positioning towards the act of ‘giving’ in a small electronic corpus of donation requests from one’s Alma Mater. The two-fold question being problematized is: why should/ need one give to these institutions, and, just how do the Writers of these letters get their ‘giving’ message across? The corpus consists in the complete and authentic texts of 33 letters dated 1993 – 2001, considered as ‘notionally’, though not statistically, representative of the current US domain (Maurenan 2001). As behavioural norms are a primary issue, APPRAISAL SYSTEMS (Martin 2000; White website 1999 - 2002) serve as the basic framework for investigating how evaluation is inscribed, but also only invoked, and on what ‘Basis’ (Jordon 2001): for instance, implicit Assessment because of socially-valued participant roles of NG ‘gift. A typology of the attitudinal resources employed in arguing just what is at stake in such action, practically and humanly, and for both giver and receiver, is tentatively offered. The paper would also investigate the value of the multidirectional descriptive method of ‘shunting’ (Halliday 1961, in 2002: 45) for finding tenable answers to this two-fold question. Thus we shift from a lower-level corpus analysis to a complementary higher-level, ‘text-collection’ analysis, but also to the significance of context and indeed intertext – and back again. It should thus be considered to be a report of select grammatical/ semantic findings in a still-ongoing computer-assisted study of Writer-Reader positioning towards the act of ‘giving’ in the corpus, but primarily be seen as an attempt at engaging with the limits of such analysis in the face of wider and more slippery research questions and interests, first among these being a desire to reconcile corpus data and methods with a persistent concern with how texts mean within specific cultural contexts.