3. Attitude/Appreciation 5

A further complication - a fine line between Appreciation and Judgement.

In general then, JUDGEMENT is concerned with positive and negative evaluations of human behaviour while APPRECIATION is concerned, not with human behaviour, but with positive and negative evaluations of artefacts, states of affairs and entities (including humans when viewed as entities rather than volitional actors.).

A further complication arises, however, in cases where the grammar is ambiguous as to whether it is human behaviour or an object/entity/state of affairs which is being assessed. Consider the sequence,

1. `The design team prepared brilliantly for what lay ahead
2. `They are brilliant planners.'
3. `It's a brilliant plan.'
4. `It's a brilliant outcome'
5. `The blue-prints for the building are brilliant'

Now utterances 1 and 2, and utterance 5 would appear to be straightforward enough. Utterances 1 and 2 are clearly concerned with evaluating the design team's behaviour, with indicating a positive view of their competence in the activity of preparing and planning. Accordingly they involve values of JUDGEMENT. In contrast, utterance 5 is unproblematically an instance of APPRECIATION since it involves an evaluation of the properties of an object/entity - a ` blue-print'. (Such an APPRECIATION may reflect on the competence of the person or persons who made the object - in this case, a blue-print - but here the evaluation of behaviour is only an indirect one. The utterance first and foremost involves an aesthetic evaluation of the entity, not of the behaviour which produced it.).

Utterances 3 and 4 are somewhat less clear cut. The problem is that terms such as `plan' and `outcome' seem to have something about them both of things/entities and of verbal processes or happenings. Grammatically they are nouns and hence thing-like. And yet they are abstract - their reference isn't to any concrete entity which can be touched or located. It is not surprising that terms such a `plan' are sometimes termed `nominalizations' or `verbal nouns'. (See, for example, Halliday and Hasan 1985.) They can be seen as verbal processes which have been represented as if they are things or entities. The verbal process of `planning' (a behaviour subject to JUDGEMENT) has been represented as if it a thing or entity (and hence subject to APPRECIATION). So what do we make of a terms such as `plan' in propositions such as `It's a brilliant plan'? Do we treat them as referencing human action/behaviour or as referencing some type of entity or thing? Similarly, do we see the evaluation in `a brilliant plan' as assessing human behaviour (and hence as JUDGEMENT) or as assessing the intrinsic qualities of some object or artefact (and hence as APPRECIATION)?

We might start by delaying answering the question and ask another question. We might ask why we are seeking to make such relatively fine distinctions. Is there anything significant here in terms of linguistic insights? Well, the point here is that there IS something at stake communicatively and rhetorically when we choose between saying (1) `The design team planned brilliantly for all eventualities' and (2) `It was a brilliant plan covering all eventualities' . The difference in communicative effect may be subtle but it is nonetheless real - otherwise why bother to choose one over the other. Utterance 1 presents a proposition about how the design-team performed. The utterance is directly about the social standing of human individuals as a result of their behaviour. In utterance 2, the human aspect is backgrounded to a significant degree. It is not the social standing of human individuals which is addressed but the properties of some abstract entity (the plan). Human individuals are thus less directly targeted for praise or blame. Utterance 2, therefore, objectifies the evaluation to some degree, turning attention away from the human individuals themselves (the design team) and their behaviour and focussing it on the product or outcome of that behaviour (the plan).

The question, then, of whether `It's a brilliant plan' involves JUDGEMENT or APPRECIATION is worth pursuing. How do we go about answering it? Well, for a start, it's necessary to state that such cases involve borderline or fuzzy categories. Such cases involve evaluations which can be seen as ambiguous as to whether they assess human behaviour (JUDGEMENT) or the products of human behaviour (APPRECIATION). They would therefore represent a special sub-grouping of evaluations which are ambiguous as to what is put at stake in terms of attitudinal positioning and, in this, they stand apart from evaluations which are not ambiguous in this way.

Secondly, we need to insist strongly upon the importance of the actual textual context in which such values occur. What has been stated earlier in a text may well guide us towards seeing a particular value as more about human behaviour (and hence involving JUDGEMENT) than about the aesthetic qualities of some entity (and hence involving APPRECIATION) or, of course, visa versa. Additionally, the guidance provided by the type of collocational framing we explored above may, possibly, provide some useful guidance. If the term is one which could fit into the slot usually occupied by a JUDGEMENT value, then this maybe an indicator that it is better analysed as JUDGEMENT. Consider for example,