An introductory tour through appraisal theory 9

Engagement

Under ENGAGEMENT, we are concerned the linguistic resources which explicitly position a text's proposals and propositions inter-subjectively. That is, this set of rhetorical resources is concerned with those meanings which vary the terms of the speaker's engagement with their utterances, which vary what is at stake interpersonally both in individual utterances and as the texts unfolds cumulatively. To put this in terms of questions of communicative functionality and rhetorical potential, the paper is concerned with the resources for by which a text comes to express, negotiate and naturalise particular inter-subjective and ultimately ideological positions.

The meanings analysed here under ENGAGEMENT are typically analysed in the literature under the various headings of evidentiality, epistemic modality and hedging - lexico-grammatical resources such as modals of probability and usuality, reality phase (it seems, apparently), projection/attribution, hearsay and so on. Under appraisal theory, however, the resources included under ENGAGEMENT are rather more extensive than those included in the traditional categories and include negation, counter-expectation (concessives) modal adjuncts of what Halliday terms `presumption' or `obviousness ( 1994: 83) as well as intensifiers such as, `I contend that ...', `He did leave the door open'..

The modelling of ENGAGEMENT has been shaped by the specific research objectives of the projects out of which APPRAISAL theory emerged. It has been shaped by projects which shared a concern for what we might term the rhetorical potential of texts - with exploring how texts are constructed not only to persuade explicitly but also to influence and ultimately to naturalise attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions by more indirect, more implicit means. The modelling was also shaped by our observation that there was systematic, text-type and discourse type related variation in the way that such persuasion and/or influence was approached. That is, we needed a model which could describe and explain the various styles or strategies of inter-subjective positioning that we had observed operating recurrently within different discourse domains. Here the notion of style or strategy relates to the favouring of a particular sub-set of values from the APPRAISAL system and a disfavouring of other values and is somewhat similar to Biber and Finnegan's notion of a `style of stance'. A number of specific objectives follow from these concerns:

• We need to understand what is at stake inter-subjectively and rhetorically when one positioning option is chosen over another - that is to say, we need to map the valeur relationships between the values and hence to understand the way different choices of values from the system have different consequences for rhetorical potential.
• We need to understand the rhetorical consequences of the interaction of these positioning values with other meanings, and most notably with values from the ATTITUDE sub-system (JUDGEMENT, APPRECIATION and AFFECT). Explicit values of attitude provide obvious sites of inter-subjective and ultimately ideological convergence and divergence and hence we need to understand how values of ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION might act to consolidate, disrupt or negotiate such convergence/divergence.

• We need to understand the possible interaction between such values both within utterances and within the text as a whole as meanings accumulate as the text unfolds.

We will return to the details of the ENGAGEMENT system in a later section.

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