Evaluative Language in English Job Advertisements in Diachronic Perspective

The received view has it that genres are subject to historical changes with respect to their functional and language features. The purpose of this article is to examine changes in the evaluation language employed in the genre of British job advertisement, in this way revealing shifts and developments in this type of discourse practice. Drawing on evidence from the corpus of job advertisements published in the Times, the national British newspaper, in the period between 1896 and 2006, this paper proposes an analysis of evaluative language usage in three collections of job advertisements from late nineteenth, middle twentieth centuries, and the 2000s. The regularities present in the data were calculated manually for every period under consideration. The comparative analysis of the data obtained for each of the synchronic layers introduces diachronic perspective into the study by revealing changes in evaluative language throughout the periods as they are reflected in an average ratio of adjectives per text, distribution of evaluative and descriptive adjectives, frequency of the entities evaluated and semantic variation of the adjectives used to evaluate entities. The aim of the study is to understand the changing role of evaluation in the genre, the way evaluative adjectives work, the role they play in persuading the applicant.