Evaluative Phrase-frames and Patterns in Doctoral Thesis Conclusions

Abstract

The language of evaluation can be identified not only in individual lexis but also in extended lexical-grammatical units such as phrase-frames. This study aims to explore evaluative phrase-frames and phraseological patterns in a corpus of conclusion chapters of doctoral theses. Through a corpus-driven analysis, a list of highly frequent phrase-frames were extracted and further refined to 21 evaluative phraseologies which contain an adjective in the variable position and are followed by a complement structure (e.g., it is * that). The identified phrase-frames were mapped onto different grammar patterns (Francis et al., 1998) and were analysed by Appraisal types (Martin & White, 2005) and evaluated entities (Thetela, 1997). The findings indicated that different phrase-frames and patterns showed clear preferences for particular Appraisal functions and evaluation types. This study suggests that there are interconnections among evaluative phrase-frames, their discourse functions, and different types of evaluation in academic discourse.