Appraisal Theory and the Annotation of Speaker-Writer Engagement

In this work, we address the annotation of language resources through the application of the engagement network in appraisal theory. This work represents an attempt to extend the advances in studies of speech and dialogue acts to encompass the latest notion of stance negotiations in discourse, between the writer and other sources. This type of phenomenon has become especially salient in contemporary media communication and requires some timely research to address emergent requirement. We shall first of all describe the engagement network as proposed by Martin and White (2005) and then discuss the issue of multi-subjectivity. We shall then propose and describe a bi-step procedure towards better annotation before discussing the benefits of engagement network in the assessment of speaker-writer stance. We shall finally discuss issues of annotation consistency and reliability.