This article describes a corpus-based experiment to identify the challenges and solutions in the annotation of evaluative language according to the scheme defined in Appraisal Theory (Martin and White, 2005). Originating from systemic functional linguistics, Appraisal Theory provides a robust framework for the analysis of linguistic expressions of evaluation, stance, and interpersonal relationships. Despite its theoretical richness, the practical application of Appraisal Theory in text annotation presents significant challenges, chiefly due to the intricacies of identifying and classifying evaluative expressions within its sub-system of Attitude, which comprises Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation. This study examines these challenges through the annotation of a corpus of editorials related to the Russian-Ukraine conflict and aims to offer practical solutions to enhance the transparency and consistency of the annotation. By refining the annotation process and addressing the subjective nature in the identification and classification of evaluative language, this work represents some timely effort in the annotation of pragmatic knowledge in language resources.

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 multisubjectivity. 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.

SFL seeks to explain identifiable, observable phenomena of language use in context through the application of a theoretical framework which models language as a functional, meaning making system (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004). Due to the lack of explicit annotation criteria and the divide between conceptual vs. syntactic criteria in practice, it has been a tough job to achieve consistency in the annotation of Hallidayn transitivity processes. The present study proposed that explicit structural and syntactic criteria should be adopted as a basis. Drawing on syntactic and grammatical features as judgement cues, we applied structurally oriented criteria for the annotation of the process categories and participant roles combining a set of interrelated syntactic variables and established the annotation criteria for contextualised circumstantial categories in structural as well as semantic terms. An experiment was carried out to test the usefulness of these annotation criteria, applying percent agreement and Cohen’s kappa as measurements of interrater reliability between the two annotators in each of the five pairs. The results verified our assumptions, albeit rather mildly, and, more significantly, offered some first empirical indications about the practical consistency of transitivity analysis in SFL. In the future work, the research team expect to draw on the insights and experience from some of the ISO standards devoted to semantic annotation such as dialogue acts (Bunt et al. 2012) and semantic roles (ISO-24617-4, 2014).