Blurb:

Premising that her corpus-assisted research has been profitable, but not invariably and/or consistently and/or unequivocally, the paper opens with a discussion of the factors upon which valuable quantitative meaning analysis may depend, and the connection between SFL and CL. The main part of the paper deliberates the case for corpus-assisted appraisal studies in the face of snares including The ‘Russian Doll’ (Thompson 2014) and ‘Piecemeal Puzzle’ syndromes. The issues are illustrated with instances from corpus-assisted appraisal studies in US congressional speech and from a literature text: Shakespeare's 'Coriolanus', where the functional role played by language patterns in construing a ‘special’ kind of social meaning exchange (Hasan 1989/1985) sets the hurdles even higher.