Investigating Professional Film Critics’ Stance towards Commercial and Art House Cinema: : A Corpus-Based Comparative Study on the Use of Evaluative Axiological Adjectives and Engagement Devices in Professional Film Reviews of Two Film Types

Sammanfattning: Evaluative stances are common in narrative and realized at all levels of linguistic structure. In film reviews, evaluation has been recognized as one of the most important stages alongside description (Taboada, 2011). Following Martin & White’s Appraisal Theory of Evaluation, the present comparative study focuses on two sub-systems of Appraisal, namely Appreciation and Engagement. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: a) to compare the way in which film critics use evaluative, axiological adjectives to evaluate two different film types and b) to study how professional film critics use of two types of engagement devices, namely epistemic and opinion devices, to position their own claims towards other potential viewpoints. The study is also influenced by two previous claims: Holbrook’s claim that, in contrast to consumers who seem to prefer American-made, commercial films, expert critics usually appreciate complex cinematography and culturally diverse films; and Carretero’s claim that in professional film reviews opinion devices are an almost absent feature, since these tend to be replaced by epistemic devices. To further explore these claims, this comparative, corpus- based study focuses on the frequency of evaluation adjectives and engagement devices used by expert film critics for the positive or negative evaluation of two different films: the 2020 box office hit “Bad Boys for Life” and the 2018 art film “Cold War”. The study used a mixed-method design, first subjecting the realizations of Appreciation and Engagement to a quantitative analysis and following this with a qualitative discussion of results. The results indicate: a) that in the case of both films positive evaluations clearly surpass negative evaluations; however, individual examples seem to express a mildly deprecatory attitude towards commercial cinematography and b) that although the number of epistemic devices in the reviews clearly surpasses that of opinion devices, the frequencies of opinion devices is greater than that observed by Carretero.