Blurb:

This paper deals with the linguistic expression of speaker/writer opinion – a phenomenon variously known as evaluation, stance and appraisal. It identifies certain semantic dimensions – evaluative parameters – along which evaluations can proceed and analyses some of their linguistic manifestations in a 500,000-word corpus of British (broadsheet and tabloid) newspaper discourse on the European Constitution. Examples of such evaluative parameters are the parameter of EMOTIVITY (the expression of approval or disapproval), COMPREHENSIBILITY (concerning the extent to which aspects of the world are evaluated as more or less comprehensible on the part of the writer), EVIDENTIALITY (evaluations concerning the source of a proposition), STYLE (evaluative comments on the communication itself) and IMPORTANCE (concerning the significance of what is evaluated). The analysis of evaluative parameters is supplemented with a traditional collocational study of keywords in the corpus. The results show some of the key sites and characteristics of evaluation concerning the European Constitution in the corpus, in particular the differences between the broadsheets and the tabloids.