Studies on evaluative meaning (EM) have a long history in the social sciences. Among these studies, linguistics has made significant contributions to describing the meaning and use of evaluative language. Nevertheless, distinct kinds of EMs in linguistic research overlap with each other. Although linguists have resorted to psychological and philosophical research to define different kinds of EMs, their conclusions cannot depict the relationships between those EMs. The key to identifying an interdisciplinary approach to this issue lies in comprehending current research trends and the influential theories in those two disciplines concerning the linguistic EM. Consequently, this study reviews the important and influential research on EMs shared by the three disciplines via bibliometric analysis. The co-citation analysis results indicate that psychological research, relevant to linguistic EM, primarily concerns whether EMs are generated automatically or consciously, while philosophical research, pertaining to linguistic EM, focuses mainly on the truth conditions of EM interpretation. Based on these results, we conclude two pairs of concepts (i.e., conscious vs. automatic and epistemic vs. ontological) that are likely to innovate linguistic methodology for analyzing EMs. In addition, owing to the existence of those concepts, two analytical perspectives (i.e., producer-analyst vs. addressee-analyst) are required in an interdisciplinary linguistic approach to defining linguistic EMs. The current study proposes a descriptive-explanatory perspective of linguistic EM research, which is beneficial for its definition and classification in the future.
Jiang et al. (Thu,) studied this question.