Redefining attitude for studying explicit and indirect evaluations of human behaviour

Abstract

This article considers the application of the Attitude framework (Martin & White 2005) to study the evaluation of human behaviour. The distinction between inscribed (explicit) and invoked (indirect) attitude is re-examined and systematised to better operationalise the analysis of the evaluation of behaviour. General linguistic evaluation triggers are identified for inscribed and invoked evaluations, and the annotation scheme is applied in a corpus of texts from different registers (a psychiatric manual, educational guidelines and informal online exchanges) concerned with ADHD. Indirect evaluations of behaviour are described as attitudinal inferences derived from (i) the behaviours of the individuals, (ii) the behavioural outcomes, (iii) the impact that the behaviour or its outcomes have on third parties and the actions that the latter may perform as a result. It is proposed that indirect evaluations of people’s behaviour are metonymically inferred through an effect→cause relation drawn across the different parts of an action scenario. The conceptual metonymy explains the directionality observed in attitude analyses (Appreciation attitude type may stand as tokens of Judgment), and it shows the impossibility of evaluating performances without indirectly appraising the human behaver.