Un estudio comparativo del despliegue de la evaluación en el discurso científico

In the last few years, a growing interest in the interpersonal dimension of language has driven researchers to explore academic-scientific discourses on the basis of the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework. This framework, sharing the view that language is related to social, cultural and institutional contexts, offers a systematic approach, Appraisal Theory, put forth by Martin (2000) and Martin and White (2005) to analyze writers’ subjective positioning. This theory provides a battery of analytical tools to reveal some of the key rhetorical strategies used to express feelings, to judge people and their actions, and to react and value the quality of things, personal appearance and other phenomena, natural or not. Three systems, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, the latter with the options of Force and Focus, are distinguished within the theory. In this work, we attempt to identify the resources of Graduation used to encode Attitude, either sharpening or subduing it in the Discussion Section of Research Articles in Audiology, and compare those results with a more widely-studied discipline, Psychology. A corpus of 30 research articles from 3 different journals from the field of Audiology and Psychology written by native English speakers in 2010 and 2011 was compiled. Results indicate a significant and varied number of evaluative resources to graduate Attitude, in which explicit resources of Force prevail in the Audiology corpus