Abstract

The central concern of this paper is the exploration of the way that some instances of negation can be employed by a writer or speaker to imply evaluative stance, especially on the part of the addressee(s), without the use of any explicitly attitudinal lexis. Under the analytical approach which informs this paper, that of the Appraisal framework (Martin & White 2005, White 1997, 2007), negation or “disclaim: deny” is treated as a sub-type of Engagement, a set of the resources by which the speaker/writer engages dialogically with prior or potential respondents to the current utterance. This paper proposes that the use of ‘negative operators’ may imply or 'project' an attitude on the part of interlocutors or third parties, with little, or no explicitly attitudinal lexis in the co-text. Instead, attitude may be implied (or invoked) on the part of the audience, by means of an array of intra and inter-textual signals, sometimes teamed with culturally shared assumptions. The paper identifies three broad functional sub-categories of disclaim: deny based on a combined corpus and attitude analysis of a small set (55,000 running words) of written interactive texts.