From corpus to register: the construction of evaluation and argumentation in linguistics textbooks

The present paper argues that there exists a partial overlapping between expressions of evaluation and argumentation in academic discourse, and subsequently tests the hypothesis of a lexico-grammar of argumentation.This is found to be close to the local grammar of evaluation posited by Hunston and Sinclair (2000). The hypothesis is tested against corpus data, namely the introductory chapters of 10 linguistics textbooks. Using descriptive and inferential statistics as a tool for analysing data, the findings show that evaluative/argumentative patterns emerge systematically from the analysis of selected concordances. In particular, some of these patterns prove to bestyle-specific, that is, typical of the style of each writer represented in the corpus.