Edited by Chiara Degano, Giuliana Garzone, Mara Logaldo and Eszter Szenes Authors are cordially invited to submit an article of max. 6.500 words (equivalent to 20 pages of about 2.250 characters including spaces). If the text contains figures, these must be included in the standard 20-page length. From the home page you will have to follow the For Authors link.
We recommend that you review the About the Journal page for the journal policies, as well as the Submissions page and the Author Guidelines for information on the upload procedure. All submitted works considered suitable for publication will undergo an anonymous double-blind review process. Deadlines:
Deadline for papers submission: 30 June 2026
Request for revision following peer review: by 20 September 2026
Final version due: by 15 October 2026
Publication: by December 2026
Contacts: LCM-journal@ledonline.it
Rationale: In contemporary communication, language serves as a powerful vehicle for expressing evaluation and emotion – key components that shape how meaning is construed, negotiated, and interpreted in discourse. Recent decades have seen significant developments in the study of evaluative meaning, particularly within the framework of Systemic-Functional Linguistics and, more specifically, the Appraisal model (Martin & White, 2005). This model has provided valuable tools for identifying how speakers and writers enact stance, express alignment or misalignment with topics and audiences, and manage interpersonal positioning through more or less explicit linguistic choices.
Within the Appraisal framework, attitude occupies a central position. Among the three categories of attitude (judgement, affect, and appreciation), affect – the emotional dimension of meaning – has attracted growing attention across disciplines, reflecting what has been termed the “affective turn” (Clough, 2007). In today’s deeply mediatised and algorithm-driven communication landscape, the evaluative and emotive dimensions of discourse play a central role in shaping public opinion, reinforcing ideologies, and fostering inclusion or exclusion. The study of affective meaning is especially relevant in the realm of AI-mediated communication, where language models and recommender systems interact dynamically with users’ attitudes and emotions.
This thematic issue invites contributions that engage with these two interrelated strands of inquiry: evaluation and emotion (affect) in discourse, whether focusing on one of them or investigating their interaction and mutual intersections. We seek to bring together scholars exploring how linguistic and discursive resources realize and negotiate attitudes, emotions, and values in a wide range of communicative contexts – spoken, written, multimodal, and digital. The aim is to take stock of twenty-five years of research inspired by the Appraisal framework, also opening up new interdisciplinary, methodological and applied perspectives on the expression and analysis of evaluation and affect in discourse. Of special interest is the discussion on the effectiveness of artificial intelligence in identifying, replicating, or mitigating the evaluative and emotional components of discourse, as well as ethical reflections on these processes. Another possible focus regards pedagogical implications, which are especially important in the case of affect: not only has it provided the basis for theoretical conceptualizations of language learning processes (cf. e.g. Karashen’s “affective filter”), but has inspired different teaching methods in their own right, e.g. the affective humanistic approach, Total Physical response, drama-based pedagogies, etc.
Contributors are encouraged to revisit and refine existing frameworks for the study of evaluation and affect, examining how models such as Appraisal can be further developed to address contemporary communicative practices. We particularly welcome papers that explore the interplay between attitude, engagement, graduation, and affect, as well as the potential for integrating corpus linguistics, multimodal analysis, and computational approaches in the exploration of evaluative and emotional meaning.
By integrating perspectives from discourse analysis, rhetoric, argumentation theory, translation studies, and AI research, this thematic issue aims to foster dialogue on how evaluation and emotion jointly shape meaning-making practices across genres and media. |
