Implicit evaluation in academic discourse: A systemic functional perspective

ABSTRACT Traditional studies of evaluation in Systemic Functional Linguistics have presented a wide range of characteristics and resources of implicit and explicit evaluation (henceforth IE and EE). These studies have revealed that IE is tactical and involves complicated expressions but they have not clearly illustrated why speakers/writers choose one linguistic expression of IE instead of another. To address this issue, we carry out a qualitative analysis of IE by establishing an analytical framework comprised of three sub-systems: value, situation and reasoning, based on a reinterpretation of IE in terms of its metafunctions. Within this analytical framework, we generalize a three-dimension space vector model to illustrate the working mechanism behind the choice between various linguistic resources of IE. The model illustrates the collaboration and the complementarity between various constituents in the analytical framework, and what has unfolded in discourse is essentially the result of the vector calculation process.