Evaluation in Institutional Talk

Abstract

The paper starts from the assumption that evaluation is a pervasive linguistic phenomenon that provides information about speakers and their environment. Using as its theoretical framework the four main types of evaluation identified by Higgins and Slade for casual conversation, the paper applies them to analyze a telephone conference recorded in a multinational company, where English is the lingua franca. It aims to identify similarities and differences between the evaluative language used by Romanian and foreign speakers of English.