A cutting-edge, new in paperback title which presents the first corpus-based account of evaluation. Evaluation is the linguistic expression of speaker/writer opinion, and has only recently become the focus of linguistic analysis. This book presents the first corpus-based account of evaluation: one hundred newspaper articles collated to form a 70,000 word comparable corpus, drawn from both tabloid and broadsheet media. The book provides detailed explanations and justifications of the underlying framework of evaluation, as well as demonstrating how this is part of the larger framework of media discourse. Unlike many other linguistic analyses of media language, it makes frequent reference to the production circumstances of newspaper discourse, in particular the so-called 'news values' that shape the creation of the news.Cutting-edge and insightful, "Evaluation in Media Discourse" will be of interest to academics and researchers in corpus linguistics and media discourse.The Editorial Board includes: Paul Baker (Lancaster), Frantisek Cermak (Prague), Susan Conrad (Portland), Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster), Dominique Maingueneau (Paris XII), Christian Mair (Freiburg), Alan Partington (Bologna), Elena Tognini-Bonelli (Lecce and TWC), Ruth Wodak (Lancaster and Vienna), and Feng Zhiwei (Beijing). Corpus linguistics provides the methodology to extract meaning from texts. Taking as its starting point the fact that language is not a mirror of reality but lets us share what we know, believe and think about reality, it focuses on language as a social phenomenon, and makes visible the attitudes and beliefs expressed by the members of a discourse community. Consisting of both spoken and written language, discourse always has historical, social, functional, and regional dimensions. Discourse can be monolingual or multilingual, interconnected by translations. Discourse is where language and social studies meet.

The author skillfully combines the quantitative calculations of distrubution of evaluations and qualitative comments on their discourse functions. The author ensured the validity of her choice of what as marked as evaluative also by consulting previous research, native speakers, the Bank of English and corpus-based dictionary. Further strengths of Bednarek's approach are that it is eclectic and does not require commitment to a particular theory of grammar. * Discourse Studies *

Dr Monika Bednarek is Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia.