A corpus-based contrastive study of evaluation in English and Italian

This book breaks new ground by considering the phenomenon of evaluation - the expression of the point of view of a writer/speaker - in opinion articles in both English and Italian. Evaluation is an under-researched topic in Italian but has received considerable attention in English since the year 2000 (Hunston and Thompson Evaluation in Text). The book considers a corpus of opinion articles from quality newspapers in English and Italian, which all deal with the Kosovo crisis of 1999, and compares both the content of the evaluations of the same entities and persons and the lexico-grammatical means by which this comes about. After the introductory chapters explaining the aim of the book, the historical background of the crisis and an overview of relevant literature in English and Italian, Chapter 4 concentrates on the figure of Milosevic and the entities NATO and the UN, comparing and contrasting the contents of the evaluation as well as the lexicogrammatical means by which this comes about in the two languages. Chapter 5 examines the overt presence of the author in pronouncing these evaluations, looking at first person verbs or impersonal expressions, and finds the English articles much more explicitly personal. Chapter 6 examines ways of attributing evaluations to others and finds that reported evaluations in the English articles encourage an attitude of suspect in the reader, whereas the Italian writers use the lexicogrammatical resources at their disposal less for this aim. Chapter 7 examines the use of adverbs of evaluation in both corpora: here too, the English corpus presents examples of adverbs (such as 'allegedly') which encourage a critical view in the reader. The English articles also appear to encourage an attitude of debate in the reader, while the Italian articles tend to dictate more the way things stand or should be read. The last chapter concentrates on the use of the interrogative in opinion articles, as rhetorical questions which are meant to persuade or as real questions which aim to open up new debates. The methodology used in the book represents both quantitative analyses and close textual reading.