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An introductory tour through appraisal theory 12

Explicit and implicit Judgement

It is vital, additionally, to distinguish between what can be termed `inscribed' (or explicit) JUDGEMENT and `tokens' of JUDGEMENT (or implicit JUDGEMENT). Under the inscribed category, the evaluation is explicitly presented by means of a lexical item carrying the JUDGEMENT value, thus, skilfully, corruptly, lazily etc. It is possible, however, for JUDGEMENT values to be evoked rather than inscribed by what the authors label `tokens' of JUDGEMENT. Under these tokens, JUDGEMENT values are triggered by superficially neutral, ideational meanings which nevertheless have the capacity in the culture to evoke judgemental responses (depending upon the reader's social/cultural/ideological reader position). Thus a commentator may inscribe a JUDGEMENT value of negative capacity by accusing the government of `incompetence' or, alternatively, evoke the same value by means of a token such as `the government did not lay the foundations for long term growth'. There is, of course, nothing explicitly evaluative about such an observation but it nonetheless has the potential to evoke evaluations of incompetence in readers who share a particular view of economics and the role of government. Similarly, a reporter might explicitly evaluate the behaviour of, for example, a Californian suicide cult as `bizarre' or `aberrant' or they might evoke such appraisals by means of tokens such as `They referred to themselves as "angels"' or `They filled the mansion with computers and cheap plastic furniture.' Such tokens, of course, assume shared social norms. They rely upon conventionalised connections between actions and evaluations. As such, they are highly subject to reader position - each reader will interpret a text's tokens of judgement according to their own cultural and ideological positioning. They are also subject to influence by the co-text, and an important strategy in the establishment of interpersonal positioning in a text is to stage inscribed and evoked evaluation in such a way that the reader shares the writer's interpretations of the text's tokens.

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