These notes accompany part 5 of The Stories We Live By: an online course in ecolinguistics, and are based on chapter 5 of the Routledge book Ecolinguistics: language, ecology and the stories we live by.
Introduction
Type of story5. EVALUATION / What it is
a story in people’s minds about whether an area of life is good or bad / What to look for
appraisal patterns, i.e., patterns of language which represent things positively or negatively
Example: low sales are bad:appalling, slump, horror show, sobering, plagued, plunged, fears, disastrous, turmoil, dire, headache, suffered, hurt, deteriorating, disappointed, gloomy, worries, dismal, decline (press reaction to decrease in sales by Tesco, Morrisons and M&S)
Example: sunny weather is good:Fed up with wet summers and ice cold winters? Take a break from the traditional British weather and get away for all-year-round sunshine holidays. Choose from the sun-soaked shores. You can enjoy great sunshine holidays at any time of year…for action packed sun holidays (travel agent)
Example: rain is good 夜はうれしく / 昼は静かや/ 春の雨
Joyful at night / tranquil during the day / spring rain (Chora)
Discussion question: What areas of life does our culture represent as good or bad (e.g., success, convenience, progress, speed, the past)? Which do we need to rethink?
The term evaluations is used in this course to mean stories in people’s minds about whether a particular area of life is good or bad. Cognitive evaluations do not involve a careful weighing up of evidence about whether something is good or bad, but are associations that we have in memory, e.g. that honesty is good and lying is bad. When these stories are widespread across a culture then they are cultural evaluations – stories about what is good or bad thathave become conventional.
There are countless cultural evaluations that are built into common ways of talking about areas of social life, such as economic growth is good, retail sales are good, increased profits are good, fast is good and convenience is good.Once cultural evaluations become established there is a danger that the reason why certain things are considered positive and others negative is forgotten. It becomes habitual to welcome the ‘good news’ that Christmas sales are high, without considering the cost to the environment or the problems of burgeoning personal debt; or to welcome the ‘good news’ that the profits of an ecologically destructive and exploitative corporation have risen.
Chapter summary
Chapter 5 of Ecolinguistics: language, ecology and the stories we live by. (Stibbe: 2015)
This chapter used appraisal theory to investigate the linguistic features that texts use to present an area of life in a positive or a negative light. The appraisal patterns in texts arise from and promote underlying evaluations in people’s minds, which are stories about whether a particular area of life is good or bad. When the same appraisal pattern appears every day in countless texts that are repeated across a society, then this is evidence of a cultural evaluation, a pervasive way that something is thought of within a society. The key cultural evaluation that was examined in this chapter was economic growth is good, which is problematic since economic growth does not necessarily lead to a more even distribution of resources in society, and is associated with ecological destruction. Appraisal patterns which represent economic growth positively are common, appearing extensively in economics textbooks, news reports, political discourse and everyday conversation. Although cultural evaluations are pervasive, they are not universal, and are constantly in a struggle with alternative evaluations. Ecolinguistics can play a role in analysing common appraisal patterns in texts, revealing the evaluations that underlie them, and asking whether there are other, alterative evaluations which can better promote the goals of the ecosophy. An important area of investigation concerns appraisal patterns which represent ordinary aspects of the more-than-human world negatively – aspects such as light rain and mist on a hot day, insects, rats and other unloved animals, or the dark of evening and night. If the boundaries of appreciation of the natural world are drawn too tightly, then this reduces opportunities to gain wellbeing and understanding through direct contact with nature.
Glossary
Affect:In appraisal patterns, expressions of affect represent participants as feeling a certain way towards something (e.g., delighted by X or devastated by X).Appraisal pattern:A cluster of linguistic features which come together to represent an area of life as good or bad.
Appraising item:A word or expression which is used to shed a positive or negative light on someone or something (e.g. in He welcomed the good news, both ‘welcomed’ and ‘good’ are appraising items which give positivity to ‘the news’).
Attitudinal terms: Terms such as best or excellent which represent a positive attitude towards what they describe in all contexts.
Connotation:The associations that a word brings to mind in addition to its direct meaning, e.g. champagne connotes luxury.
Cultural evaluations:Evaluations that are widespread across the minds of multiple individuals in a culture.
Evaluations:Stories in people’s minds about whether an area of life is good or bad.
Marked:In contrasting pairs like happy/unhappy or honest/dishonest the marked term is the one with the prefix (e.g. un- or dis-). In general, marked terms tend to have a more negative meaning than unmarked ones.
Prosody: Semantic prosody is the positivity or negativity that words take on due to other words they are typically used with (e.g., commit has negative prosody because it tends to be collated with crime or murder).
Unmarked:In contrasting pairs like happy/unhappy or honest/dishonest the unmarked term is the one without the prefix. In pairs such as high/low where there is no prefix, the unmarked term is the one used in a neutral question (e.g. ‘how high is the tower?’). In general, unmarked terms tend to have a more positive meaning than marked ones.
References and Further Reading
Alexander, R., 2009. Framing discourse on the environment: a critical discourse approach. New York: Routledge.
Martin, J.R. and Rose, D., 2007. Working with discourse: meaning beyond the clause. 2nd ed. London: Continuum.
Martin, J. and White, P., 2005. The language of evaluation: appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Salvi, R. and Turnbull, J., 2010. Appraisal theory as a methodological proposal for stylistic analysis.Textus, 23, 103–138.
White, P., 2004. Subjectivity, evaluation and point of view in media discourse. London: Hodder Arnold.
These notes draw brief extracts from Stibbe (2015: p.183-188), and glossary items from Stibbe (2015: p.200-207). Data examples are from the Ecolinguistics Text Collection (
ExtractFrom: Stibbe, Arran (2016) Living in the weather-world: reconnection as a path to sustainability. Available
This extract describes appraisal patterns and evaluations of the weather in two areas: travel agent websites and the weather forecast in the UK. It describes how a positive appraisal pattern for hot sunny weather can be ecologically destructive by encouraging people to be dissatisfied with their local area and fly off for holidays in the sun.
Sunshine Holidays
The words ‘sun’ and ‘sunshine’ are splashed across British travel websites, even appearing directly in some of their names: sunshine.co.uk, sunshineholidaysltd.co.uk, lowcostsunshine.co.uk, justsunshine.com, and sunshineholidayscornwall.co.uk. On Thomson’s ‘Sunshine Holidays’ page the words ‘sun’ and ‘sunshine’ appear 23 times in its 504 words, a clear case of what linguists call ‘overlexicalisation’. Overlexicalisation is when words appear abnormally often, giving a sense of over-persuasion that suggests something is problematic or contentious (Machin and Mayr 2012:37).
The words ‘sun’ and ‘sunshine’ are collocated with (i.e., placed near to) positive adjectives like exotic, great, favourite, fantastic, perfect, ideal, popular, and world-famous. In contrast, the weather closer to home in Britain is represented negatively as:
Fed up with wet summers and ice-cold winters? Take a break from the traditional British weather and get away to one of our destinations for all-year-round sunshine holidays. (Thomson holidays)
Asking the reader if they are fed up with wet summers and ice-cold winters presupposes firstly that summer in Britain is ‘wet’ (which is arguable since there are usually plenty of dry days) and winter is ‘ice-cold’ (which is again arguable since few days are actually frosty or snowy). It also implies that wet and cold are the kind of things that the reader would be expected to be fed up with, planting this association in their minds.
Other travel websites and newspapers also represent British weather negatively in a variety of linguistic ways:
- Fed up with wintry Britain? Here are ten destinations where you're likely to find more pleasant temperatures. (Telegraph)
- As the cold, dark nights drag on, summer seems further away than ever ... but in Orlando fun-in-the-sun never stops. (The Sun)
- Autumn is a fantastic time to jet off somewhere sunny. You don't need to go far to find better weather than British clouds. (Homeaway)
- Winter in the UK can be a depressing experience; freezing temperatures, grey skies and sleet that can keep you indoors for days. (Goeuro)
Other travel websites and newspapers represent the sunshine holiday as a form of ‘escape’, framing British weather negatively as a kind of prison:
- Are you looking to escape the gloomy British weather with an amazing summer holiday? (Opodo)
- It's time to start planning your escape from the UK this winter. (Skyscanner)
- …escape from the unreliable British weather. There are many other countries and resorts where sunshine is more predictable. (lastminute)
- escape to the sun and leave the rain behind. (Mirror)
I could, of course, go on and on, but the pattern is very clear already. Using a number of linguistic devices such as framing, collocation, contrast, and presupposition, newspapers and travel agents are telling a strong story. The story is that sunshine is fantastically good whereas cold, rain, wet or cloudy weather is bad. The bad weather is associated (rather unfairly) with Britain while the good weather belongs to the distant holiday resort. The intention is to encourage the reader to feel dissatisfied with the place they live in and the diversity of constantly changing weather in that place, and purchase holidays in the sun. Yes, it can be cold in winter, but flying off for a week in Spain is an extreme, expensive, and only temporary solution compared to buying a warm coat from a second-hand shop.
These holidays, of course, are ecologically destructive because of the fuel used in transport, the environmental impact of the hotels and the huge amount of shopping that tends to go with them. But another concern is that the holidays are just for one or two weeks a year, whereas the green spaces near home can be experienced and enjoyed all year round, with the diverse and changing weather providing variety and interest…
The Weather Forecast
It was not the travel companies who invented the story that sunny weather is good and any other kind of weather is bad, although they certainly amplify and promote the story. No, the story runs much deeper than that, and goes to the heart of British culture. When strangers meet they greet each other with ‘Lovely weather isn’t it!’ (meaning only that it’s hot and sunny) or ‘Terrible weather, isn’t it’ (meaning there’s even a hint of mist, rain or cloud). Perhaps the stranger has different political or religious beliefs, but the one thing they can be counted to agree on is that sun is good and rain is bad. It’s a frame that exists in the mind of many people across Britain.
I remember spending a long day sitting in a hot, stuffy meeting room discussing something abstract about teaching strategy. When at last it was time to go home it was getting dark already and a gentle rain was falling, invisible except where it sparkled under the streetlights. ‘Oh how horrible!’ my colleague Phil said as we emerged into the evening air. I tried to explain to him how refreshed, invigorated and alive I felt; how sitting confined indoors for hours on end goes against the way our bodies evolved; how more human it is to move our bodies freely in the fresh air and feel the gentle breeze and drops of rain against our skin. I think the way I put it was ‘But Phil, isn’t there something wonderful about this after sitting in that room so long?’ For a moment he looked around him with new eyes, ‘yes, there is’ he said, before continuing ‘but no, it’s still horrible’ and rushing off, head down, to his car. The story that only sunny weather is good ran too deeply in his mind for him to see the rain as anything other than bad.
The story only sunny weather is good is so widespread that it can be considered one of the stories we live by in Britain. The stories we live by are ways of viewing the world, that exist in the minds of many people within a culture, and appear frequently in the everyday texts that surround us, from conversations with friends to weather forecasts. Sometimes they are helpful, but sometimes they are damaging and dangerous. A story like only sunny weather is good can be damaging if it stops people from enjoying the place they live in, alienates them from nature for large parts of the year, and encourages them to travel in cars, go shopping in covered malls, escape to virtual worlds, or fly off to the sun.
Aside from everyday conversation, the story that only sunny weather is good is most strongly promoted by the seemingly innocent and mundane language of the weather forecast. Weather forecasters never seem to talk about rain as something cooling, refreshing, invigorating or life-supporting, just as a disappointment or an inconvenience.
My interest in the weather forecast started a few years ago during a long heatwave – three weeks of searing temperatures in July when I felt exhausted every day and oppressed by the sun beating down on my head and shoulders when I left the shade of the house. I longed for the cool, refreshing rain that would not only revitalise me, but also the wilting plants and the birds who were longing to splash their wings in puddles. What surprised me was how the weather forecast described the heat and sun so positively. This is a typical example, from the hottest day in the heatwave:
It’s going to look fantastic weatherwise for tomorrow…anything that you’ve got planned outdoors will be unspoiled, glorious sunshine, some very high temperatures… a very low risk of rain so broadly speaking a glorious weekend (from my local weather forecast, BBC Points West)
The pattern is clear: hot, sunny weather is positive (fantastic, glorious), and anything else is negative. There is the implication in ‘unspoiled’ that any other kind of weather would spoil the sunshine, and rain is a ‘risk’ rather than a welcome and tantalising possibility.
All through the heatwave I watched weather forecasts and wrote down the expressions they used to talk about different kinds of weather. I found that dry, hot and sunny weather was represented positively using the words fine, pleasant, nice, lovely, beautiful, best, fantastic, glorious, decent, good, perfect, glorious, and cracking. And all other kinds of weather (misty, cloudy, rainy, overcast, thundery, muggy, showery, damp, breezy, wet, dull, or grey weather) were described negatively.
The words for describing what are actually completely normal British weather conditions are almost comically negative. One forecast uses the adverb alas in ‘Alas, a lot of cloud…’ indicating total despair. There are outbreaks of rain and a plague of cloud, as if they were a disease. Clouds encroach, linger, mull about and are a nuisance, as if they were teenagers up to no good. Emotions are brought in when sadly Scotland will be ‘a bit showery’ (while England is ‘basking in lovely weather close to 30 degrees’), and ‘bits and pieces of rain’ are described as disappointing. Low coastal mist, fog, and showers are described as a threat. When at last the heatwave broke and there were heavy showers, the weather forecast described this is as nasty weather.
Looking closely, it is clear that everything that is treated negatively in the weather forecast is related either to water (cloud, rain, mist, or humidity) or to darkness (dull, gloomy, grey weather). This suggests a profound cultural fear of water, and a fear of the dark. In terms of sustainability, this is worrying since 60% of the human body is water, and we, along with all other life on the planet, depend on water for our continued survival. And darkness: there is certainly far more time that is dark, dull or grey than bright sunshine, particularly in Britain. This cultural fear of water and dark could stop us from enjoying the world we live in for most of the year, and the weather forecast could be accused of stoking this fear.
References
Machin, D. and Mayr, A., 2012. How to do critical discourse analysis: a multimodal introduction. London: Sage
The Stories We Live By: an online course in ecolinguistics.