The Linear Factor in the Construction of Evaluative Meaning in the Discourse

Abstract

This article presents the results of a study about the influence of sentence order in the construction of intersubjective meaning, particularly at the level of valorative logogenesis that derives from the form and frequency by which diverse actors, events and circumstances are presented in the Prologue of the Informe Valech (Valech Report), an official document of Human Rights in Chile. First, the research examines the sentence layout from 12 linear principles according to their nature, hierarchy and relationship. The results of this stage indicate that the linear appearance syntactically manifests processes of activation and desactivation of grammatical, cognitive, semantic and informative principles.

Subsequently, these findings were interpreted discursively through the correlation of social actors, events and circumstances of the historicized event with linearizations described for each sentence of the corpus. The analysis demonstrated the presence of complex processes of interaction between linear parameters, which determine patterns of sentence layout that produce, first, the systematic des/topicality of the historicized elements and, secondly, an unequal aboutness' styles, all of which allows us to conclude that the sentence order should be considered among the strategies that construct appraisal in the discourse.