Loud signatures: Comparing evaluative discourse styles –patterns in rants and riffs.

This paper is intended as a contribution to the investigation of evaluation in texts and in particular as a contribution to Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (or CADS), defined as a meeting of two disciplines, that of corpus linguistics and that of discourse analysis. One of the main points of CADS lies in the importance given to the systematic observation of naturally occurring data over and above the study of isolated data picked out from individual texts. This approach is particularly useful in the investigation of particular discourse types, text types or genres, to confirm intuitions which are part of the competent native speaker’s knowledge, but it can also help to reveal underlying attitudes and make explicit persuasive devices. Here, two small subcorpora are compared in order to identify the differences in evaluative styles with particular reference to textual interaction, priming, and the resources of engagement.