Functions of Language - Volume 22, Issue 3, 2015

Ruqaiya Hasan passed away on the 24th of June 2015 not long after complications arose following treatment for lung cancer. She had a remarkable career during which she played a major role in directing the trajectory of Systemic Functional Linguistic research.

From a corpus consisting of free text comments submitted to the website RateMyProfessors.com, adjectives describing people have been identified and clustered using Principal Components Analysis. This follows the Meaning Extraction method used by Chung & Pennebaker (2007). The outcome is a set of seven factors, each of which is interpretable as representing a dimension of meaning along which individual professors have been evaluated. These dimensions are in turn discussed using Martin & White’s (2005) parameters of Judgement and Appreciation, and Coffin’s (2002) concept of evaluative voices. It is argued that contributors to RateMyProfessors.com have available three distinct voices: ‘novice intellectual’, ‘consumer’, and ‘subordinate’. The paper demonstrates how a bottom-up, statistical technique may be used to provide the initial data for identifying evaluative parameters. It raises the possibility that such parameters may be specific to individual discourse communities. It therefore offers a complementary and problematizing alternative to top-down, researcher-driven taxonomies of evaluative meaning.

This study is an exploratory investigation into lexico-grammatical items specific to a large corpus of English-language post-war novels, as compared to corpora of conversation, news and academic English. Its overall aim is threefold: first, to show how the subjective impression of ‘literariness’ arising from fictional works is at least partly based on the statistically significant use of highly specific words and lexico-grammatical configurations; second, to attempt a broad classification of key words and patterns; third, to illustrate the fiction-specific patterns formed by three key words. Analysis proceeded in three steps. First, a key word analysis was performed. In the second step, all two-to-five word strings contained in the English corpus were generated. In the third step, multi-word strings, collocations and colligations associated with three English key words (‘thought’, ‘sun’ and ‘jerk’) were analysed. Results indicate that post-war fiction is characterized by the dense use of specific sets of key words and key patterns, such as multi-word strings (must have been), phrase frames (like a + NP, there was a + NP) colligations (PossDet thoughts were on NP), collocations (the strengthening sun) and lexically specific narrative patterns (PossDet thoughts were interrupted when/as + time clause). The patterns in question are shown to be interconnected through a complex web of analogical creations. Implications are discussed for theories of literature, lexicology and translation.