Contrastive analyses of evaluation in text: Key issues in the design of an annotation system for attitude applicable to consumer reviews in English and Spanish

This paper reports on part of the research on evaluative language currently carried out within the CONTRANOT project,1 which aims at the creation and validation of contrastive functional descriptions through corpus analysis and annotation in English and Spanish. More concretely, we will present the coding scheme designed for Attitude, a subcategory of Appraisal as studied within Systemic-Functional Linguistics (White, 2003; Martin and White, 2005). The criteria for selection and annotation of spans of Attitude in the coding scheme are specified and illustrated with examples from the Simon Fraser University Review Corpus (Taboada, 2008), a corpus of consumer-generated reviews on hotels, books and movies, and a smallscale English-Spanish contrastive analysis of these reviews has been carried out. The scheme is to be used for the future annotation of evaluation in an English-Spanish corpus, CONTRASTES (Lavid, 2008; Lavid et al., 2007, 2010). Once annotated, the reviews will be part of this corpus.