Evaluativos

Evaluativos refers to words, phrases, and expressions that express value judgments, attitudes, or affect toward a referent. They convey the speaker’s stance more than objective facts and are a central component of evaluative or appraisal language. Evaluativos can occur across parts of speech and can be lexical items or phrases that signal positivity, negativity, or nuanced stance.

Types and examples include evaluative adjectives such as positive terms (bueno, excelente, maravilloso; great, fantastic) and negative terms (terrible, horrible, despreciable). Evaluative adverbs and adjectives can be complemented by intensifiers (extremadamente, sumamente) or mitigators (un poco, quizá) to shade the strength or openness of the evaluation. Nouns and phrases can also serve evaluative functions when they express judgment about people, actions, objects, or events (un desastre, una maravilla).

In linguistic theory, evaluatives are often analyzed within the broader notion of appraisal or stance. In the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, attitudes are grouped into affect (emotions), judgment (social value and ethics), and appreciation (aesthetic or evaluative value of objects and phenomena). Evaluatives thus reflect speakers’ stance toward people, actions, or things and can reveal opinions, credibility, or emotional reaction.

Usage and characteristics: evaluativos contribute to discourse by signaling stance, guiding interpretation, and shaping reader or listener reception. They can be polarized (clearly positive or negative) or hedged (ambiguous or cautious). They interact with polarity, context, and culture, and their interpretation may depend on shared norms and background knowledge.

Applications: studying evaluativos is important in discourse analysis, lexicography, translation, and sentiment analysis. In computational linguistics, detecting evaluative language helps identify sentiment, attitude, and authorial stance, while challenges include irony, sarcasm, and culturally conditioned norms of judgment.