2.5 Summary

The first section of this chapter has reviewed Pawley&Syder’s lexicalized sentence stem，sentential semi-fixed expressions that are formally similar to TSSs but that are investigated with a different approach and focus.Section 2.2 has reviewed initial research on textual sentence stems by Granger&Paquot.Section 2.3 has discussed the evaluative potential of TSSs，with a particular focus on the phenomenon of evaluation in both the ESP and the multilingual context.Section 2.4 has explained why and how to investigate TSSs by surveying the corpus-driven study of phraseology.Special emphasis has been given to the interconnection between lexis and grammar and the idiom principle postulated by Sinclair and further explored in the description of English grammar patterns.It has been shown that large computerized text corpora not only facilitate the description of functionally complete lexico-grammatical sequences，but also open up new possibilities of research on the cross-linguistic equivalence of such multiword expressions.

Overall，previous studies have well documented the role of evaluation in general English texts and academic texts，both monolingually and multilingually.No doubt，findings from these studies，in particular those associated with the functional explanation of evaluative devices in different social settings，can be used to support particular arguments in the present book.However，most studies have tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the meaning and function of single words and set phrases.The findings have been based mainly on citations and examples selected from a limited number of texts and therefore have lacked the necessary statistical rigor.The investigation of TSSs is expected to complement the existing work，and we will discuss in more detail how this will be done in the next chapter.