This thesis explores the content and realization of evaluation through the lexico-grammar in comparable corpora of English and Italian opinion articles on the 1999 Kosovo crisis. The evaluations of the war protagonists Nato, Milosevic and the United Nations are compared, and goal-achievement is revealed to be important: negative evaluation of Nato concentrates on lack of achievement in the English corpus, and on lack of clarity of goals in the Italian. The evaluative adjective moral is found to be a banner word in the English corpus. Investigations into the lexico-grammar include an analysis of a) first person verbs and impersonal structures with evaluative functions, in which it is found that the English corpus makes greater use of first person structures; b) reporting markers before that-clauses and che-clauses, where argumentative attitudes towards reported propositions are more frequent in the English corpus, and c) adverbs of stance, which are used more to make argumentation explicit in the English corpus. The functions of interrogatives are investigated: interrogatives in the English corpus are interpreted as closing down debate in the text more than in the Italian corpus. Overall, evaluations in the English corpus are found to have a more overtly argumentative slant than their Italian equivalents.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:633229 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Murphy, Amanda Clare |
| Publisher | University of Birmingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.0017 seconds