A Pragmatic Approach To Negative Evaluative Utterances

Evaluative utterances involve speakers’ expression of their attitudes towards certain entities. A speaker assesses an entity and takes a stance while making an evaluative utterance. In this process, the speaker expresses his attitudes on the pleasant-unpleasant dimension, which leads to the distinction between positive evaluation and negative evaluation. This dissertation employs a pragmatic approach to analyze general features of negative evaluative utterances as well as features, principles and strategies concerning negative evaluative acts in a specific discourse.Studies of evaluation have drawn scholars’ attention from fields such as philosophy, logic, ethics, and systemic functional linguistics, but those from the pragmatic approach are relatively rare. Pragmatics takes evaluation as a type of speech act and puts a great emphasis on evaluative utterance understanding. Evaluative utterances can be realized through words, phrases and sentence structures with evaluative meanings. Previous studies of evaluative utterances are mainly conducted from three aspects:conversation analysis, functions of evaluative utterances, and strategies for evaluative acts. Studies from the aspect of conversation analysis focus on turn-taking involving evaluative utterances with frequently occurring turns being listed. Analysis of functions focuses on the process in which writers or speakers express their attitudes through evaluative utterances, persuading readers or hearers to accept their opinions. Researches on strategies, which are closely related to concepts such as face and politeness, are conducted in order to identify writers’ or speakers’ choices of strategies.A review of these studies shows that specific ones centering on negative evaluative utterances are rare. Most of them are based on written data collected from book reviews or advertisements. Moreover, the social context and the cultural context have been partly ignored. This dissertation will focus on negative evaluative utterances with spoken data from SBC, COCA and newspapers. The theoretical framework covers speech act in context, principles and strategies concerning politeness theories and impoliteness studies (Leech,1983; Brown&Levinson,1987; Culpeper2011), as well as Du Bois (2007)’s stance triangle.Analysis of general features in the present study covers various aspects including types of negative evaluative acts, premises that arouse speakers’ negative attitude, criteria of evaluation, degrees of intensity, hearers’ responses, and functions of relevant utterances. Negative evaluative acts can be divided into self-oriented (negative evaluation of the speaker himself) vs. other-oriented (negative evaluation of the hearer or an absent party) ones, genuine vs. mock ones, and direct vs. indirect ones. Premises of negative evaluation mainly include a person’s physical appearance, performance, behaviors, personality traits as well as a certain entity or state. Criteria of evaluation can be personal preferences, social norms or conduct rules, and cultural standards that involve cultural assumptions. Speakers can adopt different degrees of intensity with their choices of lexical items and strategies. Intensity degrees are related to factors such as the immediate situation, distance or power relationship between participants, and imposition of negative evaluation in a certain culture. Negative evaluation is realized in interaction, which indicates the important role of hearers’participation. Hearers can respond to negative evaluative utterances in different ways such as acceptance, resistance, and asking for details. Through negative evaluative utterances, speakers can express their negative attitudes, change unpleasant evaluated entities, build solidarity with hearers, and gain power.Based on the analysis of general features, this dissertation also conducts a case study of the Obama-Romney interaction with a focus on principles and strategies concerning negative evaluative utterances in the specific discourse of political campaigns. A speaker’s violation of certain principles or choice of inappropriate strategies may threaten his own face and weaken the effect of negative evaluation. The most important consideration in American political campaigns is the interest maxim:(1) to maximize the interest of one’s own party;(2) to minimize the interest of the other party. Under the influence of this impetus, speakers tend to follow four sub-maxims:being well-grounded, being objective, being morally justified, and being constructive. Strategies of negative evaluative acts are studied from the four aspects of strategy types, modifications, rhetorical devices and speakers’stance-taking. Seven strategy types are identified in the present data, including explicit expression of one’s negative attitude, identification of the problem, presenting facts, predicting a bleak future, clarifying criteria of judgment, asking for change, and making a comparison. Modifications can be divided into internal modifications that mainly include cajolers and intensifiers as well as external modifications such as sweeteners, preparators, and disarmers. Rhetorical devices including metaphor, allusion, rhetorical questions, and mockery are frequently adopted. When performing a negative evaluative act, a speaker positions himself, evaluates the object negatively and aligns with other subjects. In the Obama-Romney interaction, the speaker tends to position himself by distancing from his rivals and building convergent alignment with the audience.This dissertation is complementary to speech act studies since it has explored general features of negative evaluative utterances and proposed a tentative way to analyze principles and strategies concerning negative evaluative acts in a specific discourse with data from the Obama-Romney interaction. Findings offer certain implications for participants in interaction, helping them understand and perform negative evaluative acts properly.