Evaluative phraseological choice and speaker party/gender

This chapter continues investigation into register-idiosyncratic features of evaluation in parliamentary debate (Miller 2007; Miller and Johnson 2009, to appear), reporting findings regarding the phraseology it is * time to/for/that in a corpus of US congressional speech on the Iraq war. Quantitative data are tested for saliency against both general and political corpora. Qualitative analysis focuses on the enactment of APPRAISAL systems (Martin and White 2005). Methodology involves “shunting” (Halliday 2002 [1961]: 45), and a focus on “coupling” (Martin 2000: 163–164) which affords attitude (Martin and White 2005: 62 ff.; Miller and Johnson, to appear). The chapter examines how appraisers’ choices are affected by party/gender, recognizing that choice may transcend register boundaries due to both the ‘repertoire’ of the individual and his/her ideologically saturated ‘reservoir’ of culturally specific ways of meaning (Martin 2010: 23).