The grammar of a language like English provides language users with linguistic
(lexicogrammatical, specifically morphosyntactic) resources to express meaning, construct
sentences and texts, and to communicate with other speakers (see, e.g., Quirk,
Grenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Thompson, 2004).
Prosodic, phraseological, and discourse-pragmatic features are also
... [Show full abstract] included in numerous
grammars (see, e.g., Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Hunston, 2011). These grammatical
resources are used by speakers to express evaluation, which Thompson and Hunston
describe as follows:
For us, evaluation is the broad cover term for the expression of speaker or
writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities
or propositions that he or she is talking about. The attitude may refer to certainty
or obligation or desirability or any of a number of other sets of values.
Modality may be seen as a sub-category of evaluation. (2000, p. 5)