ABSTRACT
As Martin and White (2005) stated, the purpose of developing an appraisal framework was to expand traditional accounts regarding issues of speaker/writer evaluation, certainty, commit ment and knowledge, and also to consider how the textual voice positions itself with respect to other voices and other positions in the discourse. As a result, this theoretical orientation moves us towards an analysis of ‘meanings in context and towards rhetorical effects rather than towards grammatical forms’ (Martin and White 2005: 94), because the grammar and discourse of language are conceived as a set of resources that ‘make’ meanings, more than as rules to organise structure (Martin and Rose 2008). Appraisal has to do with the negotia tion of meanings among real or potential interlocutors, such that every utterance enters into processes of alignment or misalignment with others, helping us to understand the levels and types of ideological solidarity that authors maintain with their potential readers/listeners. Consequently, one important aspect that has been emphasised by Martin (2000: 143) is not only that appraisal allows the researcher to examine ‘how speakers can exploit different ranges of appraisal to construct particular personae for themselves’, but also that:
[T]he expression of attitude is not, as is often claimed, simply a personal matter – the speaker ‘commenting’ on the world – but a truly interpersonal matter, in that the basic reason for advancing an opinion is to elicit a response of solidarity from the addressee.
