Multimodal resources within evaluative language: a contrastive analysis between English and Catalan

Abstract

This paper reports a contrastive analysis in which different semiotic modes are analyzed when producing evaluative language in English and Catalan, that is, when a speaker manifests attitudes, shows points of view, and makes judgments. In order to carry out the present study, a task, consisting of two topics was administered; data consisted of informal oral interactions produced by four students who studied the Bachelor’s degree in English Studies of the Jaume I University. Data were gathered by means of video recordings, which allows for a multimodal analysis. Furthermore, immediately after the completion of the tasks, an interview was conducted in order to gather information about their perception during the spoken task and their experience being video recorded. The analysis of the present study has been made by comparing and contrasting informal communication from a small corpus of video recordings in English and Catalan. The results of this analysis show that the use of non-verbal resources while evaluating does not vary when using English as an additional language (AL) than when using Catalan as their first language (L1). However, it seems that non-verbal performance helps participants to make themselves understood easily in the AL; this could be related to the fact participants do not feel so confident in their AL as they are in their L1 to express their opinions orally. Finally, these results also serve to understand better spoken production by showing the relevance that non-verbal resources have in spoken conversation, in both English and Catalan, as well as by showing how evaluative language appears not to vary in the number of occurrences across languages.