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Título:
Evaluation: Connecting paralinguistic features and Appraisal
Lugar:
Madrid
Reunión:
Workshop; Int-Eval: International Workshop on the Evaluative Function of Language: Evaluation across Text Types and Cultures; 2011
Institución organizadora:
UNED
Resumen:

The purpose of this paper is to present a possible connection between the phonological subsystem of paralinguistic features and Appraisal in spoken discourse and pose a number of questions that may lead to research in the area.

Within Systemic-Functional Linguisics, Appraisal theory extends the account of interpersonal meaning by presenting a framework of ways in which writers or speakers construct texts and adopt stances towards what they say and towards those to whom they say it. As EFL phonetics teachers, we are concerned with Appraisal as it deals with the speaker?s evaluation of what is going on in oral discourse and with the ways and means by which that evaluation is revealed. In other words, Appraisal has to do with how speakers show feelings, roles, status, judgment, that is, with how ?appraisers? show attitude in speech (Martin and White 2005). Attitude is ?gradable? in the sense that its ?force? can be increased or diminished. Related to this Eggins and Slade (1997) devised the category of amplification,which they define as ?the way speakers magnify or minimize the intensity and degree of the reality they are negotiating? (p.125),

Most studies on Appraisal seem to focus on the written language and on lexico-grammatical resources. Even in the case of conversational appraisal analysis, the main focus of interest is on the attitudinal meanings of the words used by the participants in the conversation. However, the expression of evaluation, that is, the way in which attitude is conveyed and interpreted in spoken discourse depends not only on the choice of words but also on other resources such as body gestures or movements, and on the interplay of prosodic and paralinguistic features, some of which are subsumed under the heading of intonation.

Brown (1990:112) describes paralinguistic features as those features of speech that ?do not form an intrinsic part of the phonological contrasts? of a language and ?which contribute to the expression of attitude by a speaker?. It seems to us that Brown?s approach adds to the theory of Appraisal. When present in the message, paralinguistic features are indicators of the feelings, emotions and values involved. Normally, these features are used to reinforce the verbal content of the message. However, speakers sometimes use these resources to contradict the verbal content in some way or other, in which case the attitudinal meaning becomes much stronger.

Since empirical evidence seems to indicate that paralinguistic features operate mainly in the area of amplification (magnifying or minimizing) of attitudes and emotions, this paper will deal with the analysis of one text, a story, adopting Brown?s (1990) taxonomy of paralinguistic features, and Eggins and Slade?s (1990) categories of Appraisal.