Evaluative language in scientific discourse: terminological framework and methodological perspectives

Evaluation is considered as a key feature in scientific communication and academic writing. It is a crucial pragmatic tool in scientific activity among specialists and experts. The paper provides a systematic review of authorial evaluation research in the literature and aims to outline the major strands of current research. The study was carried out as interdisciplinary and intercultural analysis. It showed that different methodological approaches have been adopted to examine the issues of evaluation across disciplines, different sociocultural practices, languages, through different analytical lenses. The review is based on the publications in the scientific area in Russian and English. Based on contextual-interpretive analysis, comparative analysis of literature, analytical review of theoretical concepts, the study identified the current state and the major theoretical and methodological approaches adopted in the field of pragmatic linguistics, text linguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic axiology over the past thirty years. It revealed the terminological diversity used to describe the evaluative language in English literature. As relevant sources there were selected publications in peer-reviewed journals and/or chapters from monographs published in 1990-2022, indexed in the RSCI, Scopus, WoS, ERIH PLUS databases. The search query included the Russian terms otsenka, otsenochnost’, and the English terms evaluation, stance, appraisal, voice. The main strands in research on the evaluative use of language have been identified, namely: the stance strand, the analysis of the authorial stance, when the speaker/writer adopts a certain value position and makes it visible in the text structure by means of linguistic devices; the appraisal strand, the study of a wide range of evaluative devices that show the author’s attitude to the subject of the statement, the communicative partner; the voice strand, coordination with other voices, dialogic involvement of the author’s voice in other subjective positions.