Resources for attitudinal meaning

Abstract

Lexicogrammatical resources enable us to construct attitudinal stances not only toward interlocutors and audiences but also toward the ideational content of propositions and proposals. Seven semantic dimensions of evaluative orientations to propositions are identified and compared to those for clause modality. A sample corpus of newspaper editorials is used to illustrate the resources which realize these evaluative meanings in connected running text. Examples are also given of several interesting text-semantic phenomena that arise from the prosodic realization of attitudinal-orientational meanings in connected text, including attitudinal cohesion and syntactic, projective, and extended prospective and retrospective propagation of evaluative meanings. It is proposed that evaluative meanings should play a significant role in discourse analysis of social heteroglossia and individual and collective identity.