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Comparing Engagement in Non-fictional Texts: An English-Spanish Contrastive Study of Argumentative and Expository Texts from a Parallel Corpus

MARTA CARRETERO

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Abstract

Following the Appraisal framework, this paper explores the role of Engagement in 20 argumentative and 20 expository texts from MULTINOT, an English-Spanish parallel corpus. The realisations of the different subcategories of Engagement were submitted to quantitative analysis, and the main results are as follows: firstly, the distribution of Engagement devices in the English and Spanish texts displays more differences than expected, which hints that these devices were not always faithfully translated; secondly, the comparison of the original texts in both languages shows distributional differences in the more delicate categories of Engagement but not in its main categories; and thirdly, distributional dissimilarities were also found between the argumentative and expository texts, largely due to the informative purpose of the latter and the persuasive purpose of the former. These results together provide evidence of the close relationship between persuasion and evaluation in language.

Keywords: Appraisal, Engagement, argumentative texts, expository texts, English-Spanish contrastive analysis, UAM Corpus Tool.

1 Introduction

Following the Appraisal system of analysis of evaluative language, developed within Systemic-Functional Linguistics (Martin and White 2005; White 2002, 2015), this paper addresses the linguistic expression of Engagement, one of the three major subcategories of Appraisal, which concerns the relation between what is being communicated by a speaker or writer and other actual or potential viewpoints. The texts selected for analysis are English and Spanish non-fictional texts of two types, namely argumentative and expository, extracted from the MULTINOT corpus, a comparable and parallel corpus (described in Section 4).¹ Both kinds of texts deal with facts and information, but differ in that argumentative texts intend to persuade the reader of the validity of a given position on a certain issue. The research aims to gain further insight into how the distribution of different kinds of Engagement expressions is influenced by the language and the main purpose of the texts.

The paper is structured as follows: Section 2, which describes the theoretical framework, contains a brief description of the Appraisal system and a more detailed description of the system of Engagement. Section 3 states the research hypotheses. Section 4 describes the MULTINOT corpus and the method used for analysing the data. Section 5 discusses a number of unclear cases, some of which might be analysed as belonging to two different categories of Engagement, while others display an overlap of Engagement with Attitude or Graduation; the decisions taken regarding the analysis in these cases are made explicit. Section 6 specifies and discusses the results of the quantitative analysis. Section 7 contains a final discussion and concluding remarks.

2 Theoretical Framework

2.1. THE APPRAISAL SYSTEM

Appraisal is a well-known system aimed at analysing the language of evaluation, that is, the linguistic expressions that indicate “the subjective presence of writers/speakers in texts as they adopt stances towards both the material they present and those with whom they communicate” (Martin and White 2005:1). This system was developed within the systemic-functional approach to linguistics and had its origins in work carried out in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s for the Write It Right Project, conceived as an aid for students in schools for the disadvantaged. Studies on Appraisal have been dramatically expanded to the analysis of different languages and registers.²

Within the Appraisal system, the main categories are Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Attitude concerns the expression of emotional, moral and aesthetic opinions, as in (1):

(1)The debtors’ prisons of the nineteenth century were a failure – inhumane and not exactly helping to ensure repayment. (EO_ ESS_001)³

Graduation concerns the expression of gradability, i.e. the strengthening or weakening of the opinions expressed. Expressions of Graduation, unlike expressions of Attitude, do not have intrinsic positive or negative values but acquire them in context. Graduation is divided into two subtypes: Focus and Force. Focus involves prototypicality, in the sense of proximity or distance to a core or exemplary member of a category. Examples of Focus are the italicised expressions in ‘literally redemptive’ or ‘typically, they are sophisticated financial institutions’. Force consists in the modulation of the impact of what is stated, as in ‘even more delighted’ or ‘shows much promise’.

Engagement, the system on which this paper focuses, concerns the ways in which speakers or writers position themselves with respect to the content communicated and to possible reactions and responses to their positions. That is to say, Engagement concerns the relation between what is being communicated and other actual or potential viewpoints. Language users may engage or disengage with their own words by quoting, reporting, acknowledging other possibilities, denying, affirming, etc. (Martin and White 2005: 36). The subcategories of Engagement are treated in detail in Section 2.2.

2.2 THE SYSTEM OF ENGAGEMENT

The system of Engagement as defined above is based on the notions of dialogism and heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981; Voloshinov 1973), inscribed in a dialogic perspective of communication. Within this perspective, all verbal communication is ‘dialogic’ in the sense that to speak or to write is “to reveal the influence of, refer to, or to take up in some way, what has been said / written before, and simultaneously to anticipate the responses of actual, potential or imagined readers/listeners” (Martin and White 2005: 92). The most general distinction within the system of Engagement is that between Monogloss and Heterogloss. Monogloss consists in “not overtly referencing other voices or recognising alternative positions” (Martin and White 2005: 99). Monoglossic utterances are thus not considered in relation to other alternative perspectives. The distinction between Monogloss and Heterogloss cuts across another distinction in the expression of the speaker/writer’s attitude, namely that between epistemic and effective stance (Langacker 2009: 291; Marín-Arrese 2011). Epistemic stance pertains to the speaker/writer’s position concerning knowledge about the states or events designated, while effective stance concerns the ways in which the speaker/writer tries to influence the course of reality. Monoglossic epistemic stance is expressed by bare assertions, as in (2), and monoglossic effective stance by the imperative mood.

(2)The Portuguese Crown granted lands in usufruct to Brazil’s first big landlords. (ETrans_EXP_016)

By contrast, Heterogloss does consider alternative positions. In the case of effective stance, heterogloss includes, for instance, deontic modality, which means obligation, recommendability or permission. The study of Engagement in this paper is restricted to heteroglossic epistemic stance, that is, to the author’s signalling of an explicit position in the transmission of information; effective stance, whose concern is not to inform about the world but to act (or attempt to act) upon it, will not be considered.

For the study of heteroglossic epistemic stance, which from now on will be labelled with the shorter name ‘Heterogloss’, I have adopted the system proposed in Martin and White (2005). The only difference lies in the category of Entertain, which in Martin and White’s model is not divided into subcategories even if they acknowledge that it contains expressions with different meanings, such as expressions of epistemic modality and evidentiality, and pseudo-questions. I believe, however, that it is worth conferring the status of subcategories to these meanings, in order to view their relative weight in the expression of Entertain as a whole. The subcategories are called Estimate, Infer, Speculate and Opine, and will be defined in 2.2.1. below. The resulting system of Heterogloss, explained in the remainder of this subsection, is synoptically presented in Table 1.

Table 1. The system of Engagement used in this paper. The labels in italics are the additions to Martin and White’s (2005) proposed in this research.

The remainder of this section is an account of the subcategories of Heterogloss. The account is illustrated with expressions that commonly realise concrete categories, even if the value of each expression ultimately depends on the context in which it occurs. Other expressions, however, are not easily assigned to a given category; some instances of these are treated in Section 5.

2.2.1 Expansion

Expansion is a subtype of Heterogloss, which “corresponds to utterances which acknowledge dialogically alternative positions and voices” (Martin and White 2005: 102). There is no strong support of the position presented; rather, other possible positions are acknowledged as deserving consideration. Not surprisingly, Expansion often has the effect of weakening assertiveness. Expansion is subdivided into two categories: Entertain and Attribute.

The Entertain option consists in “presenting the proposition as grounded in its own contingent, individual subjectivity, [so that] the authorial voice represents the proposition as but one of a range of possible positions” (Martin and White 2005: 98). As stated in the Introduction, Martin and White approach Entertain as a broad category encompassing expressions with different meanings, which have the common function expressed in the definition. However, I believe that the analysis benefits from a finer grained distinction between submeanings. Two of them correspond to the conceptual categories of epistemic modality and evidentiality, two categories which qualify commitment to the information transmitted (Nuyts 2001; Carretero and Zamorano-Mansilla 2013). The difference lies in that epistemic modality does so in terms of probability, as in the English example (3), the Spanish example (4) and its English translation (5), while evidentiality concerns the kind or source of evidence, as in (6). Epistemic modality, and evidentiality to a lesser extent, have often been treated in the literature as expressing commitment to the truth of a proposition. However, Martin and White (2005: 109) state that the main function of epistemic and evidential expressions in actual discourse is not to qualify commitment to the truth of a proposition, but to indicate dialogism, i.e. consideration of alternative points of view. I believe, however, that the meaning of epistemic and evidential expressions in terms of commitment to the truth of a proposition is not incompatible with the expression of dialogism, but rather is a subtype of dialogism; indeed, to qualify the content communicated by means of an estimation of probability or by assessing the evidence available implies the consideration of alternative states or events as other possibilities:

(3)Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to. (EO_EXP_003)

(4)Pero, quizás porque se habían tomado en serio su destino de dueños del mundo, se habían embarcado en tantas empresas que estaban desbordados (SO_ESS_003)

(5)But, maybe because they had taken their destiny as rulers of the world seriously, they had embarked upon so many endeavours that they were overwhelmed. (ETrans_ESS_003)

(6)And yet there are few signs that working- and middle-class Americans are living any better than they did 35 years ago. Even stranger, productivity growth does not seem to be soaring, as one would expect; (EO_ESS_006)

It is true that these expressions display cases where the epistemic or evidential meaning is bleached into a more general dialogic function, as in (7), where the real reason for using perhaps is to save face rather than to express a qualification of probability:

(7)But briefly, and perhaps a little misleadingly, I can at least state that my point of view entails that it is our present lack of understanding of the fundamental laws of physics that prevents us from coming to grips with the concept of ‘mind’ in physical or logical terms. (EO_EXP_015)

Therefore, the specific consideration of epistemic and evidential expressions as subtypes of Entertain may well bring about differences between tendencies in the realisation of this category depending on the language and discourse type. Consequently, two subcategories have been created for these types of expressions; in keeping with the other labels in the Appraisal framework, these subcategories have been named with verbs that indicate what the speaker/ writer does with language when s/he uses them. The labels chosen are ‘Estimate’ for epistemic modal expressions, and ‘Infer’ for evidential expressions. It must be noted that Estimate and Infer only include epistemic and evidential expressions that do not express a high degree of commitment to the validity of the information: strong epistemic and evidential expressions enhance assertiveness and hence lie within the scope of Contraction, as will be seen in 2.2.2. Nor does Infer include expressions that mention the persons or things (such as reports or studies) that provide evidence; these expressions are classified under “Attribute”, as will be seen below in this section.

Examples of Estimate expressions in English are: modal auxiliaries (may, might, could, must, should) when they express epistemic modality; adverbs (perhaps, probably, maybe…); adjectives (likely); mental state verbs in the first person when they occur with verifiable utterances (I think, I believe), and expressions with nouns such as expectations, possibility or risk. Spanish correlates of all these expressions have been found in the texts. Examples of realisations of Infer are lexical verbs (seem, appear…), adverbs (allegedly, apparently, presumably, reportedly, seemingly…) and their Spanish equivalents.

Another subcategory of Entertain will include those cases in which a dialogic alternative is presented without expressing a specific degree of commitment. To this kind belong the expository questions specifically included within Entertain in Martin and White (2005: 110) although not as a subcategory, such as (8) and its Spanish translation (9), as well as conditional clauses that present the proposition without expressing commitment to its truth or falsity (10), and expressions of lack of knowledge (11). The name chosen for the category is ‘Speculate’. By contrast, pseudo-questions assuming an obvious answer belong to Contraction, subcategory Concur (Martin and White 2005: 123), as will be seen in 2.2.2.

(8)to what extent are minds functionally dependent upon the physical structures with which they are associated? (EO_EXP_015)

(9)¿en qué medida [la mente] depende de las estructuras físicas a las que está asociada? (STrans_EXP_015)

(10)If Greece does well, its creditors will receive more of their money (EO_ESS_001)

(11)It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with this issue. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate. (EO_EXP_020)

A further meaning within Entertain that could not be accommodated in the subcategories mentioned above concerns the cases where the writer indicates that what s/he is communicating is his/her own opinion, which may well coexist with other opinions. These cases, signalled with the category Opine, differ from Estimate and Infer in that the truth of the proposition is treated as non-verifiable; that is, the utterance has no objective truth and consequently the writer’s opinion may well coexist with other different opinions (Carretero and Zamorano-Mansilla 2013: 324-325). Some expressions of Opine are arguably, in my opinion or to my mind.

Martin and White also include deontic modality as part of Entertain (2005: 110-111) but, as was stated above, the deontic category expresses effective stance and is therefore excluded from the analysis. Therefore, the Entertain system devised for this research consists of four categories: Estimate, Infer, Speculate and Opine.

The other subcategory of Expansion is Attribute, which covers the representations of the proposition as grounded in the subjectivity of an external voice, thus situating it within a range of possible positions (Martin and White 2005: 98). In other words, the information is attributed to an external source and the writer does not express a high degree of commitment (the cases in which the writer subscribes to the information belong to Contraction, subcategory Endorse, as will be seen in 4.2.1.). I adopt Martin and White’s (2005) division of Attribute into the subcategories of Acknowledge and Distance.

Acknowledge comprises the cases in which the source of the information is specified, but the writer gives no clues about his/her own position. The expressions of Acknowledge include verbs of saying and of thinking with persons different from the first (he/she thinks, they say, it is said… X reports / states / declares / announces / believes / thinks…), and expressions of opinion by persons different from the writer (in X’s opinion / view…, according to X…). Distance differs from Acknowledge in that the authorial voice explicitly distances itself from the information transmitted by the specified source (Martin and White 2005: 113), by expressing or implying that this information is false or at least unreliable. Examples of Distance are (12), as well as (13) and its English translation (14):

(12)In other words, we are producing and consuming much more than our economic indicators suggest – and the creators of many of those products are not being adequately compensated. (EO_ESS_006)

(13)Sólo faltaban mil años para que los fuegos purificadores del juicio final arrasaran el mundo, según creían los hombres del siglo XV (SO_EXP_003)

(14)According to fifteenth-century man, only 1,000 years remained before the purifying flames of the Last Judgment would destroy the world (ETrans_EXP_003)

2.2.2 Contraction

Contraction differs from Expansion in that, even if it also admits the existence of alternative positions, “the utterances challenge, fend off or restrict the scope of the alternative positions and voices” (Martin and White 2005: 102). That is to say, the writer supports only one of these positions. Expressions of Contraction are used when the writer feels the need to lay emphasis on commitment to the truth of the information that s/he is transmitting because it is not obvious to others and hence challengeable. Therefore, Contraction seems out of place when there is no room for challenge: for example, certainly would be odd in I’m certainly wearing a green coat in a face-to-face conversation. Contraction is divided into two subtypes: Proclaim and Disclaim.

The subcategories of Proclaim are Concur, Pronounce and Endorse. Concur “involves formulations which overtly announce the speaker / writer as agreeing with, or having the same knowledge as, some projected dialogic partner”. (Martin and White 2005: 122). That is, the statement is presented as agreeing with, or having the potential to agree with, the majority of voices. Expressions of Concur include adverbials that express agreement with previous expectations (of course, naturally, not surprisingly, admittedly…), strong evidential expressions such as clear, evident, obvious and the derived adverbs, and other ways of indicating agreement with other opinions (as everyone knows, it is well-known that, it is acknowledged that, no-one would deny that…), as well as the Spanish equivalents of these expressions. Concur also includes those expository questions that assume an obvious answer (Martin and White 2005: 123), such as (15) and its Spanish translation (16):

(15)Does anyone in their right mind think that any country would willingly put itself through what Greece has gone through, just to get a free ride from its creditors? (EO_ESS_001)

(16)Alguien en su sano juicio cree que algún país estará dispuesto a atravesar voluntariamente lo que Grecia ha tenido que atravesar, sólo por conseguir ventajas de sus acreedores? (STrans_ ESS_001)

The second subtype of Proclaim, Pronounce, “covers formulations which involve authorial emphases or explicit authorial interventions or interpolations” (Martin and White 2005: 127). That is, the author expresses that his/her opinion is firm, without referring to other opinions. Realisations of Pronounce include emphatic affirmation, expressions of epistemic certainty (certainly, definitely, really, surely, for sure…), lexical verbs referring to speech acts or mental states of certainty, in the first person (I know, I say…), other expressions which insist that the facts are real (the fact is that…), and even parallelisms or repetition of words.

The third subtype, Endorse, “refer[s] to those formulations by which propositions sourced to external sources are construed by the authorial voice as correct, valid or undeniable or otherwise maximally warrantable” (Martin and White 2005: 126). Endorse resembles Attribute in that an external source is mentioned, but in this case the writer supports only the position expressed by the source, thus expressing high commitment to the information transmitted. Expressions of Endorse include verbs such as show, prove, demonstrate, find or point out with different persons from the first.

The Disclaim category challenges some contrary position, by openly rejecting it or by positioning itself at odds with it. Its subcategories are Deny and Counter. Deny consists in the overt negation of a proposition. Cases in which negation affects only part of the clause, as in (17), have also been included, since the writer’s intention is still to reject the idea that Greece should bear the consequences. Verbs with negative meaning such as lack, fail or neglect have also been considered as cases of Deny, following Mora (2011: 65).

(17)If Europe has allowed these debts to move from the private sector to the public sector – a well-established pattern over the past half century – it is Europe, not Greece, that should bear the consequences. (EO_ESS_001)

The other subcategory, Counter, “includes formulations which represent the current proposition as replacing or supplanting, and thereby ‘countering’, a proposition which would have been expected in its place” (Martin and White 2005: 120). In short, this category concerns counter-expectation. Among the many realisations of Counter, the most frequent are conjunctions and connectives of contrast such as although, however, yet, but, adverbials such as even, only, just, still, already or yet, and the Spanish equivalents of all these expressions. Counter also includes the adverbials actually and in fact and Spanish correlates such as en realidad or de hecho.

3 The Research Hypotheses

Before embarking on the actual Engagement analysis of the texts, three hypotheses were set. The first was that expressions of Engagement tend to be faithfully translated; in order to check this hypothesis, the texts analysed (see Section 4) include English and Spanish originals and their translations. A corollary of the first hypothesis was the second hypothesis, namely that a comparison including only the original texts in both languages would show greater differences: the English and Spanish essays would tend to favour the use of language-specific preferred devices. The third hypothesis was that the distribution of Engagement expressions would differ depending on text type: Contraction expressions could well be more numerous in the argumentative texts, since the writer has a greater need than in expository texts to defend his/her position against other possible alternatives; by contrast, Expansion devices might well be more common in the expository texts to signal limitations of the present state of knowledge. These hypotheses will be tested by comparing the data in the ways specified in Section 4.

4 The Data, Software and Method

The texts analysed here were extracted from the MULTINOT corpus, which consists of original and translated texts in both directions and is designed as a multifunctional resource to be used in different disciplines, such as corpus-based contrastive linguistics, translation studies, machine translation, computer-assisted translation and terminology extraction. The MULTINOT corpus, described in more detail in Lavid et al. (2015), includes a wide range of registers from the written mode, following typologies used in other parallel corpus projects, such as the DPC corpus (Paulussen et al. 2013) and the CroCo Corpus (Hansen-Schirra et al. 2012). The registers included are the following: novels and short stories; news reporting articles; manuals and legal documents from webpages; official speeches and proceedings of parliamentary debates; annual reports and letters of self-presentation of companies, promotion and advertising brochures; scientific texts; essays; and popular science expository texts.

The data chosen for analysis were 40 texts belonging to the last two categories: 20 essays and 20 popular science expository texts. The essays were written in the 2000’s, and the expository texts from 1980 onwards. The texts were also evenly divided according to the criteria of language (20 English and 20 Spanish) and originality (20 are original texts, and 20 are their translations).

The references and URLs of all the texts are specified in the Appendix. The argumentative texts are political essays on economics; the English originals were extracted from the non-profit international organisation Project Syndicate, which publishes and syndicates opinion articles on topics such as global affairs, economics, finance and development, and has members in many countries around the world. This organisation also provides the Spanish translations. The Spanish argumentative originals were extracted from the quality newspaper El País, and their translations were downloaded from the URL ‘Essay and science’, a webpage aimed at spreading original essays written in Spanish. The English and Spanish argumentative essays sometimes include short biographical notes about the authors. These parts were excluded from the analysis, since they lie outside the texts proper. The English and Spanish expository texts were extracted from highquality books by prestigious authors and publishers, aimed at the dissemination of knowledge in the areas of science and social science.

Many of the texts contain 1,000 words approximately; the others were cut after the paragraph to which the 1000th word belonged, so as to maintain a balanced number of words. Therefore, the 40 texts analysed amount to approximately 40,000 words.

The quantitative analysis was carried out with the aid of the UAM Corpus Tool, a free tool created and regularly updated by Mick O’Donnell at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.⁴ The choice of this software was due to its systemic-functional orientation, which makes it adequate for designing systems of options that serve as the basis for quantitative analyses.

In order to test the hypotheses, a threefold comparison of the expressions of Engagement was carried out:

a.All the English texts (originals and translations) versus all the Spanish texts;

b.The original English texts versus the original Spanish texts;

c.The argumentative versus the expository texts.

While performing the analysis, a problem was posed by the expressions of Engagement attributed to other sources, cited by means of direct or indirect reported speech or in some other way, which do not reflect the writer’s dialogic position. In order to register these cases, two new categories were created: a distinction was made between the cases in which the writer subscribes to the cited source (‘Cited-Contraction’) or else does not consider it as completely reliable (‘Cited-expansion’). Each of these categories was in turn divided into Expansion and Contraction, depending on the dialogic position of the expression itself. Given the limited number of expressions of these categories, no further distinction was made between the subtypes of Expansion and Contraction. The resulting system is depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The system of Engagement used in this paper

In order to clarify the actual signalling of the ‘Cited’ categories, let us consider (18) and (19):

(18)El cacique Tecum, al frente de los herederos de los mayas, descabezó con su lanza el caballo de Pedro de Alvarado, convencido de que formaba parte del conquistador: Alvarado se levantó y lo mató. (SO_EXP_004)

English translation: ‘The chief Tecum, leading the descendants of the Mayas, beheaded the horse of Pedro de Alvarado with his lance, convinced that it was part of the conquistador: Alvarado stood up and killed him.’ (ETrans_EXP_004)

(19)For example, research finds that women tend to be less confident and less likely to negotiate for pay rises and promotions than equally qualified men. (EO_EXX_004)

Convencido in (18) and its correlate convinced are classified as ‘Cited expansion’, since the writer does not consider the chief Tecum as a valid source of information, and the subcategory is ‘Ex-contraction’, since Tecum is portrayed as having a firm belief. By contrast, in (19) the writer expresses alignment with the cited source, research finds, and the expression less likely expresses Expansion, thus being qualified as “Cited contraction: Co-expansion”.

5 Analysis of Unclear Cases

The system of Engagement, described in Section 2.2., provides a clear definition of subcategories and a number of sample realisations of each; however, given that the boundaries of Appraisal categories are context-dependent and inevitably not clear-cut, cases were found where categorisation was not easy. To start with, the realisations of the different categories were sometimes more complex than the standard realisations; for instance, some examples of Estimate are expressions with nouns that point to possibilities for future events to occur, as in “growth prospects are even worse” (EO_ESS_006), or “mi hipótesis de trabajo es la siguiente” (SO_ESS_004), translated as “my working hypothesis is the following” (ETrans_ ESS_004). Even a seemingly easily detectable category such as Counter, often realised by expressions such as however, although or yet, displayed instances where the realisation was rather more complex, such as (20), where the Noun Phrase headed by paradoxes indicates a contrast between a circumstance (‘in a time…’) and the rest of the proposition expressed by the that-clause.

(20)One of the great paradoxes of our time is that workers and middle-class households continue to struggle in a time of unparalleled plenty. (EO_ESS_006)

Another problem was posed by the modal auxiliary will referring to future time. As is well-known (a sample reference is Palmer (1990)), there is disagreement among scholars about whether it expresses a ‘pure future’ or else its modal value is maintained in all the cases. In the present study, will has been considered as a case of Pronounce, since in the texts studied here it mostly expresses speculative predictions, as in (21), rather than ‘safe’ predictions such as ‘My sister will be fifty next month’. However, will has not been signalled when it is falls under the scope of another Engagement expression; in these cases, it borrows the value of that expression. For example, will in (22) does not express Pronounce, since it falls under the scope of the weaker Estimate expression remains uncertain, and hence it has not been considered as an Engagement span.

(21)Addressing these problems will be difficult, but not impossible. (EO_ESS_005)

(22)But, unless the proper policies to nurture job growth are put in place, it remains uncertain whether demand for labor will continue to grow as technology marches forward. (EO_ ESS_009)

The remainder of Section 5 will concern two basic kinds of problems, treated in 5.1. and 5.2., respectively. The first concerns a number of linguistic devices that lie in between two subcategories of Engagement; the second pertains to the boundaries between Engagement and Attitude.

5.1 DOUBTFUL CASES BETWEEN TWO SUBCATEGORIES OF ENGAGEMENT

There are many cases in which a source of evidence is cited, but the way in which it is cited does not give explicit indications about the writer’s degree of commitment, so they could be classified under either of the two subcategories of Attribute (Acknowledge and Distance) or under Endorse. A typical example of these ambivalent expressions are English according to and its Spanish equivalents de acuerdo con and según. In order to determine the writer’s attitude towards the source, the reliability (prestige or authority) of the source and the text as a whole have been considered. For example, the expression starting with según in (23) has been classified as Acknowledge, since another study is cited next and the writer does not show full commitment to either, while in (24), which belongs to the same text, the prestige of the source has motivated its classification as Endorse.

(23)Según un cálculo, a nivel mundial las mujeres ocupan alrededor del 24% de los puestos ejecutivos superiores. (STrans_ ESS_004)

English original: ‘By one estimate, women hold about 24% of top management positions globally’ (EO_ESS_004)

(24)Según datos del Foro Económico Mundial, hay una correlación importante entre los avances de un país en cuanto a cerrar la brecha entre los géneros – particularmente en educación y fuerza laboral – y su competitividad económica. (STrans_ ESS_004)

English original: WEF [World Economic Forum] data suggest a strong correlation between a country’s progress in closing the gender gap – particularly in education and the labor force – and its economic competitiveness. (EO_ESS_004)

Knowledge of the world may also play a role in expressions with the source cited. We know that Marco Polo’s appreciation of geography and raw materials was invaluable in his time but is now completely outdated. Consequently, the italicised expression in (25) has been classified as Distance:

(25)Out of Marco Polo’s sparkling pages leaped all the good things of creation: there were nearly 13,000 islands in the Indian seas, with mountains of gold and pearls and twelve kinds of spices in enormous quantities, in addition to an abundance of white and black pepper. (ETrans_EXP_003)

5.2 OVERLAPPING CASES BETWEEN ENGAGEMENT AND OTHER APPRAISAL CATEGORIES

This section covers cases in which there are arguments for considering the linguistic devices as instances of both Engagement and Attitude.⁵ The most remarkable overlapping cases are those that express uncertainty tinged with emotion, called ‘apprehension’ in Lichtenberk (1995) (see also Lavid et al. 2016, 2017). An expression of this kind is one hopes that in (26). These cases have the feeling component of Affect and the reasoning component of Engagement (Carretero 2014: 72). I have opted for including these cases as Estimate.

(26)One hopes that those who understand the economics of debt and austerity, and who believe in democracy and humane values, will prevail. Whether they will remains to be seen. (EO_ESS_001)

In other cases, Engagement was difficult to disentangle from Graduation, the main reason being that both categories concern the strengthening or weakening of assertiveness. In particular, certain adverbs that emphasise the extent to which the information is true, such as largely, completely or literally and their Spanish equivalents, belong to Focus: Sharpen but they have a similar effect to expressions of certainty such as certainly or undoubtedly, classified as Pronounce.⁶ This distinction has been maintained, thus keeping the two kinds of adverbs separate.

6 A Comparative Analysis of the Engagement Options in the Expository and Argumentative Texts

This section starts with a global characterisation of the Engagement expressions in all the texts, and then shows the results drawn from the comparisons in the three ways stated in Section 4: the English versus the Spanish texts, the original texts in the two languages, and argumentative versus expository texts. In all the cases, the significance of the differences was subjected to the chi-square test and, according to what is common practice in social science research, the difference was considered to be significant if the p value equalled or was smaller than 0.05.

6.1 A GLOBAL CHARACTERISATION OF THE ENGAGEMENT EXPRESSIONS IN ALL THE TEXTS

The distribution of the Engagement expressions in all the texts by categories is given in Table 2. Considering that the total number of words is approximately 40,000 words and that the total number of expressions is 1,860, the normalised frequency is 46.5 Engagement expressions per thousand words. Not surprisingly, the Contraction expressions double those of Expansion, due to the high frequency of the two categories under Disclaim: expressing negation or presenting the truth of a proposition as contrary to expectations are common devices in the use of language in general. The difference between Expansion and Contraction is even greater in the two categories of Cited expression categories, where Contraction exactly quadruples Expansion. Within Entertain, the most common category is Estimate, followed by Speculate, while Opine is almost non-existent: the authors did not adopt dialogic positions that indicated possibility for different individual judgements. In its turn, Attribute displays a higher frequency of Distance than of Acknowledge. Within Contraction, the distribution among the three types is roughly balanced, Pronounce and Concur being the most and the least common, respectively.

Table 2. Distribution of the Engagement spans in all the texts

6.2 ENGAGEMENT IN THE ENGLISH AND SPANISH TEXTS

Table 3 shows the distribution of the Engagement expressions of the major categories in the English and Spanish texts (originals and translations). Although the distribution of the frequencies of the categories is similar at first sight, the chi-square test has proved that the difference is significant, thus partly disconfirming the first hypothesis. This difference is due to the higher number of Contraction expressions in the Spanish texts, and above all in the Citedexpansion fragments, which are more than twice as common in the English texts; that is, the translations have not always maintained the Appraisal categories of the original. An example is (27), which occurs within a quotation, where the translator includes an expression of Cited expansion: ex-Contraction that does not occur in the original (28).

(27)“He continually lived in impatient anticipation of something his brain was sure to produce” (ETrans_ESS_004)

(28)“[…] Vivía siempre a la expectativa, más bien impaciente, de algo que iba a surgir en su cabeza” (SO_ESS_004)

As for the subtypes of Expansion and Contraction, the chi-square test yields no significant distributional differences in any of the cases; this result partially confirms the first hypothesis. However, it must be noted that Contraction shows the dissimilarity that Proclaim and Disclaim are more common in the English and Spanish texts, respectively.

Table 3. Distribution of the Engagement spans by major categories in the English and Spanish texts (originals and translations)

With regard to the more delicate categories (see Table 4), the chisquare test yields no significant differences either. Concur is slightly more frequent in the English texts, due above all to the occurrences of of course (totalling 8), which are sometimes not translated, as may be seen in (29) and its translation (30).

Table 4. Distribution of the Engagement spans by delicate categories in the English and Spanish texts (originals and translations)

(29)These are among the issues I shall be attempting to address in this book. To ask for definitive answers to such grandiose questions would, of course, be a tall order. (EO_EXP_015)

(30)Éstas son algunas de las cuestiones que intentaré tratar en este libro. Pedir respuestas definitivas a preguntas tan fundamentales estaría fuera de lugar. (STrans_EXP_015)

The two subcategories of Disclaim, on the other hand, are more common in the Spanish texts than in the English texts. The difference in Deny is due to the fact that in Spanish the number of negative expressions is sometimes higher: in (31), coordination of two negative clauses is expressed by means of ni (‘nor’), while in English this coordination is often achieved by or, as may be seen in its translation (32):

(31)For the most part I will try not to advocate particular policies or to advance the agenda of the political left or right. (EO_EXP_020)

(32)En gran parte intentaré no defender unas políticas concretas ni promover la agenda de la derecha o la izquierda. (STrans_ EXP_020)

As for Counter, the larger number of occurrences in the Spanish texts uncovers the fact that the Spanish translations sometimes make this meaning explicit, for the sake of clarity, even if it is implicit in the originals. For example, the original fragment cited in (33) has no explicit Counter device; however, pero (‘but’) is included in the translation (34).

(33)The Earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. (EO_ EXP_002)

(34)La Tierra es un lugar, pero no es en absoluto el único lugar. (STrans_EXP_002)

6.3 COMPARISON OF THE ORIGINAL ENGLISH AND SPANISH TEXTS

The distribution of the main Engagement expressions in the original English and Spanish texts is specified in Tables 5 and 6. Both

Table 5. Distribution of the Engagement spans by major categories in the original English and Spanish texts

Table 6. Distribution of the Engagement spans by delicate categories in the original English and Spanish texts

Expansion and Contraction are more common in the English texts but, as Table 5 shows, there are no significant differences in the relative frequencies of the English and Spanish texts. On the other hand, the differences in the distribution of the subcategories of Expansion and Contraction are significant. As for the more delicate level of subcategories, Table 6 shows that the distributional differences are significant for Attribute and Proclaim, but not for Entertain and Disclaim.

The expressions of Entertain in the English originals more than triple those of the Spanish originals. In spite of the non-significance in the distribution of the subtypes, it is worth mentioning that the English expressions of Estimate are almost four times as frequent as the Spanish ones. The English writers were thus more prone to express statements with a weak degree of probability: the most common expressions are the modal auxiliary may in its epistemic sense (9 occurrences), the adjective likely (7 times) and the adverb perhaps (6 times); other expressions, such as might or the noun risk also appear several times. In the Spanish texts, however, the adverb quizá/quizás (‘perhaps, maybe’) only appears twice. As for Infer, the expressions in the English texts more than double those in the Spanish texts. The verb seem occurs 5 times; curiously, its synonym appear occurs only once. In the Spanish texts, the close equivalent parecer does not occur at all.

In contrast to Entertain, Attribute is more common in the Spanish originals. Acknowledge is more frequent in the English texts, but the expressions of Distance in the Spanish texts more than triple those of the English texts; a reason for this may be that a large part of the Spanish expository texts concern history and contain citations of ancient sources of information such as Marco Polo, prestigious in their time but now unreliable because of modern knowledge (see example 19 above). In addition, and more importantly, the authors of the Spanish argumentative texts tend to cite more information from unreliable sources (and later refute it), as in (35), whose translation is quoted in (36):

(35)En la crisis financiera de 2008, la creencia de que los riesgos se pueden calcular, asegurar y vender a otros incitó a asumir más riesgos. (SO_ESS_001)

(36)In the financial crisis of 2008, the belief that risks could be calculated, insured and sold on to others incited dealers to take on even more risks. (ETrans_ESS_001)

Concerning Contraction, the number of expressions of Deny is virtually equal in the texts of the two languages, while Counter is more common in the English texts. If we consider that the cases of Counter are more frequent in all the Spanish texts than in all the English texts, we can infer the importance of the tendency of Spanish translations to use cohesive devices even if they are not used in the originals, pointed out in 6.2. and exemplified with (33) and (34) above. That is to say, this higher explicitness of adversative or concessive relations seems to be a feature of Spanish translations compared to the original English texts, but this feature is not seemingly due to a tendency of Spanish written discourse to signal these relationships more explicitly than English written discourse. Research on cohesion along these lines would be welcome.

6.4 COMPARISON OF THE ARGUMENTATIVE AND EXPOSITORY TEXTS

The distributional differences in the number of Expansion and Contraction devices in the argumentative and expository texts are yielded by the chi-square test as significant (see Table 7), the main difference being that Expansion is more frequent in the expository texts, while the expressions of Cited-expansion, although they are few altogether, are more than twice as common in the essays. That is to say, the essays display more cases of dialogic acknowledgement of alternative positions through reference to other sources. The percentages of Contraction are almost identical in the two subtypes. Noticeably, the relative percentages of Expansion and Contraction present in both essays and expository texts are similar to those registered for English and Spanish professional and consumer-generated film reviews in Carretero (2014: 77), which were 34.95 for Expansion and 65.05 for Contraction. These data together hint that, in non-fictional texts aiming at transmitting information and/ or persuading the reader, typically the occurrences of Contraction roughly double those of Expansion.

Table 7 also shows that the distributional differences between the main categories of Expansion and Contraction are significant. In particular, Proclaim is markedly more frequent in the argumentative texts, while Entertain is more common in the expository texts, which is not surprising due to the greater need of the writers of essays to defend their dialogic position. The distribution of the most delicate subtypes, given in Table 8, indicates that the differences are significant for the subcategories of Contraction (Proclaim and Disclaim) but not for the subcategories of Expansion (Entertain and Attribute).

Table 7. Distribution of the Engagement spans by major categories in the argumentative and expository texts (originals and translations)

Table 8. Distribution of the Engagement spans by delicate categories in the argumentative and expository texts (originals and translations)

With regard to Contraction, the occurrences of Concur are almost equal in the two text types, while Pronounce and Endorse are more frequent in the argumentative texts. That is to say, the support of dialogic position is most commonly realised by emphasising one’s own viewpoint (Pronounce) or by supporting the position by authoritative or prestigious sources (Endorse). With regard to Disclaim, it is globally more common in the expository texts; the cases of Counter are virtually the same for the two registers, but the expository texts display more cases of Deny, which often refer to a contrast between people’s beliefs and the way things actually are, as in (37), a fragment that contains eight instances of this category:

(37)It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no “around” around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can’t even ask how long it has been there—whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn’t exist. There is no past for it to emerge from. (EO_ EXP_001)

With regard to Expansion, although the distribution of the subcategories in Entertain and Attribute is not significant, attentive observation leads us to note that the higher frequency of Entertain in the expository texts is largely due to the difference in number of Estimate devices, which is also related to the main difference in the overall purposes of the texts. Estimate expressions tend to weaken the writer’s assertiveness and this weakening is more at odds with the persuasive purpose of argumentative texts than with the informative purpose of expository texts. The high frequency of Speculate in both text types is plausibly due to the intellectual character that they share: writers often pose complex questions with no obvious answers, as in examples (8-9), in order to trigger reflection and then propose answers through reasoning.

7 Final Discussion and Concluding Remarks

This paper has set forth a quantitative study of the Engagement expressions in 40 argumentative and expository texts, consisting of English and Spanish originals and their corresponding translations into the other language. I acknowledge that the study has limitations concerning the accuracy of the labels assigned to the expression of Engagement, mainly because all the texts were analysed by the author of the paper: the analysis of the same texts by one other researcher (or more) and the ensuing comparison of the results would have been an extra tool for detecting possible errors, and the cases of disagreement would have led to an increase in the refinement of the criteria for assigning expressions to the different categories. Nevertheless, as its stands, the analysis may be considered to be sufficiently reliable for proving the hypotheses stated in Section 3.

The first hypothesis, namely that the expressions under study were faithfully translated to a great extent, has been partially disconfirmed by the significant distributional differences found in the major Engagement categories (Expansion, Contraction, Cited-expansion and Cited-contraction) in the English and Spanish texts. The main reason was that the Spanish translations sometimes added explicit Counter expressions that were absent in the English originals. This finding, together with the higher frequency of Counter expressions in the original English texts than in the original Spanish texts, lead us to believe that the Spanish translations of non-fictional texts had a tendency to overspecify cohesion, an issue that could be pursued in further research. On the other hand, this hypothesis has been partially confirmed by the absence of significant differences in the distribution of the main types of Expansion and Contraction and of all the subtypes of these categories.

The second hypothesis, which stated that differences would be found in the English and Spanish originals, has also been partially disconfirmed by the distribution of the main Engagement categories, but partially confirmed by the distributional differences found in all the subcategories of Expansion and Contraction, and especially in the subtypes of Attribute and Proclaim. The English originals display more cases of Entertain, especially of the subcategories Estimate and Infer.

The third hypothesis, namely that the distribution of Expansion and Contraction in argumentative and expository texts would differ due to the overall aims of both texts, has been confirmed by the results in terms of both the main categories and their subtypes: not surprisingly, Expansion was more common in the expository texts, which aim above all to transmit knowledge, and Contraction in the argumentative texts, where the need to persuade the reader is greater.

This study provides evidence of the crucial role of the expressions of Engagement in persuading the reader that the writer’s assessment is the most sensible within the array of actual or potential viewpoints. The need to be persuasive is more obvious in the essays, but is far from being non-existent in the expository texts. This persuasive role of Engagement may be noticed in many of the examples cited in this paper, such as (15), (16) and (37), to name only a few. Engagement, then, may be considered to offer a privileged perspective on the pervasive relation between persuasion and evaluation in language.

Further research on Engagement in different types of non-fictional texts, especially from parallel corpora, could be carried out in order to shed light on the extent to which the main findings presented here could be extrapolated to other types of non-fictional texts. If we begin by comparing the results presented here with those of Carretero’s (2014) study on film reviews, we find that the three categories that involve citation of a source of information, namely Acknowledge, Distance and Endorse, are markedly more common in the texts analysed here; conversely, Counter is even more frequent in the film reviews, for the reason that critics are quick to communicate the ways in which expectations created by films are unfulfilled in order to warn prospective viewers (Carretero 2014: 76). These differences are one more illustration of how different subtypes of non-fictional texts create different needs for writers to assess their position against other possible positions with regard to the information transmitted and of how writers actually cope with these needs. That is to say, the relative frequency of the Engagement categories seems to vary according to the subtype of nonfictional text, depending on the writers’ assessment of the need to place emphasis on one category or other in order to legitimise their position or, in other words, to persuade the addressee that they are legitimate sources of information.

Acknowledgements

This research has been carried out as part of the EVIDISPRAG Project (reference number FFI2015-65474-P MINECO/FEDER, UE). We gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Regional Development Fund. My thanks are extended to an anonymous referee for his/her thorough report on a first version of the paper. The remaining shortcomings and inconsistencies are my sole responsibility.

References

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