Making and evaluating suggestions.
Linguistic features used for decision making purposes

Karin Sode-Woodhead

Evaluations in speech and text have often been taken to be purely a lexical matter, or, at most, identifiable as falling within a fairly limited set of grammatical categories such as adverbs and certain subcategories of adverbs. In my paper I will show how evaluative meanings are much more complexly ingrained at grammatical as well as discourse level than has often been assumed.

My examples will be taken from a corpus of problem solving meetings in small to medium sized manufacturing companies in England and Scotland. In such meetings, suggestions and evaluations of suggestions are key features. I shall demonstrate how the evaluations may be realised through features such as cohesive links between turns, pronominal choices, and the grammatical marking of participant roles.

Ultimately, I am aiming to complement the top-down perspective of choosing an act within a given context and investigating the linguistic realisation of it with a bottom-up perspective in which the identification of certain structures are seen as indicators of such context specific acts. If time allows it, I shall suggest preliminary models for this part of my study.