KIERNAN Patrick James    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Business Administration    Position   Professor
Language	English
Publication Date	2011
Type	Academic Journal
Title	Evaluation and identity: Extending appraisal theory to explore positionings of self.
Contribution Type	Sole-authored
Journal	Japanese Journal of Systemic Functional Linguistics
Volume, Issue, Page	6
Details	In any conversational storytelling situation, an important function of evaluation is to evaluate the teller. This is all the more the case where the stories are drawn from personal experience to illustrate something about the person’s life as is the case with anecdotes told in life story interviews. This paper explores evaluation as a resource for identity work in the context of narrative anecdotes told by teachers in interviews that were explicitly concerned with their life histories. In doing so, it builds on Martin and White’s (2005) systemic model of Appraisal and illustrates how the basic resources of Appraisal such as the use of ‘force’ and ‘focus’ or engagement contribute to the narrators’ identity work. In particular, engagement is explored in conjunction with Duszak’s (2002) approach to ‘Us and Others’ to reveal four strategies that speakers use for self evaluation: (1) direct evaluation of the self; (2) evaluation of the self through the words of others; (3) negative evaluations of others as anti-self; and (4) positive evaluations of others as idealised self. These strategies are proposed as a refinement on the model and illustrated through sample narratives from the interviews.
ISSN	1884-9504