Evaluative Adjectives in Linguistic Lectures at the University of Montenegro

Abstract

One of the key features of academic discourse is evaluation, a discourse category which in university lectures reflects a speaker’s attitude towards the propositional content. In this paper it is examined through a category of evaluative adjectives which has proved to signal the most salient aspects of university lecture discourse. The analysed corpus is composed of lectures in linguistics recorded at two organisational units of the University of Montenegro – the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute of Foreign Languages. As a starting point in categorising evaluative adjectives we use a semantic division introduced by Swales and Burke (2003). The analysis also focuses on outlining the frequency of the examined categories of adjectives obtained with the help of AntConc 3.2.4.w soft ware and provides the most typical illustrations followed by a detailed discussion. The results achieved have demonstrated that the most frequent adjectives are those of relevance. On the contrary, Swales and Burke’s study has shown that adjectives of size dominate their coprus of American lectures. Furthermore, our analysis has revealed that centralised forms of all the analysed categories prevail over their polarised realisations. The results point to a conclusion that although evaluation represents a constituent part of the university lecture genre, it is not strongly emphasised, on the contrary, it acquires a more neutral dimension.