ENGAGEMENT, as already indicated, covers all those resources by which the textual or authorial voice is positioned inter-subjectively. Lexicogrammatically it encompasses a diverse array of resources:
On what basis is it proposed, therefore, that such lexico-grammatical diversity should be grouped together within the one system? As indicated above, there are several well-established traditions within the literature by which at least a sub-set of these resources are analysed as serving a similar rhetorical functionality. Thus analyses under the headings of `evidentiality', `modality' and `hedging' will often include modal verbs and adjuncts, reality phase and at least some types of attribution/reported speech. It is rather less usual for such analysis to include values of negation and expectation/counter-expectation, but these values do nevertheless sometimes receive and analysis under these headings. The insight at work here is, as Lyons for example has argued (Lyons 1977), that all such meanings serve to indicate an attitude towards the proposition or proposal by the speaker/author.
I concur to the extent that I see such values as attitudinal in the broadest sense of the term. I differ from these established analyses, however, in that, I see as inadequate the truth-functional orientation of traditional modality theory, the epistemic reliability orientation of the evidentiality approach and the negative/positive face approach typically adopted by the `hedging' literature. I will propose an alternative analysis of the rhetorical functionality of these resources, following suggestions from Lemke ( 1992), Fairclough ( 1992), Thibault ( 1997) and Fuller (1998), based on Bakhtin's inter-connected notions of heteroglossia and dialogism (1973, 1978, 1981, 1986). I will argue that this heteroglossic understanding of the semantics of ENGAGEMENT is much more compatible with Halliday's characterisation of the functionality of MOOD in that it understands inter-subjective positioning in social rather than individualistic terms and in that it attends to the way all utterances are centrally concerned with the negotiation of interactional and informational meanings.
