Engagement and Non-Engagement: Two Notions at the Core of an Annotation Schema of Enunciative Strategies (2025)

Abstract: This study provides an annotation schema of a wide range of enunciative strategies underlying every enunciation process by which an enunciator actualizes a predicative content. We show that most of these enunciative strategies involve the enunciator in a relationship of Engagement (concerned with the notions of truth value and axiological/appreciative value) or Non-Engagement toward a stated predicative content. Our approach takes place in the French enunciative framework rooted in the work of Bally (1932). We explicitly compare our approach with that of Appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2003). We also illustrate the applications of our schema with a manual annotation experiment conducted on a corpus of French history textbooks. This experiment reveals interesting diachronic variations in the enunciator’s modes of Engagement and Non-Engagement .

## introduction in the lineage of what is called the enunciative approach of language notably rooted in the work of @xcite , we are interested in the various strategies of actualization of a predicative content that are mobilized by an enunciator when producing an utterance. a predicative content such as be blue(the car), comprising a predicate (be blue) and its argument (the car), can be mobilized in an utterance in multiple ways (see ex. (1a) to ( 1g )), suggesting different actualizations and attitudes with regard to the same predicative content. ## exploring some manual annotations 4.1 corpus description in this section, we present the results of the manual annotation of a collected french corpus, comprising 858 clauses extracted from history lessons in eight textbooks. four of them (referred to as "ancient") were published in the 19th century. they were referenced by the modoap project foot_0 , which draws on a larger corpus of digitized textbooks hosted by the french online library gallica foot_1 . in addition, four textbooks published in the 21st century ("modern") were collected to support diachronic comparison in this study. the clauses are evenly distributed across 3 themes: (i) christopher columbus and the age of discovery, (ii) martin luther and the reformation, and (iii) the french revolution. the clauses composing this corpus are independent clauses (see section 3.1). we designed a tool for the automatic segmentation of the corpus into independent clauses. based on the syntactic analysis provided by stanza @xcite , this tool implements a heuristic that consists in identifying verbs (or adjectives or nouns within verbal constructions) that have a syntactic dependency of the conjunction or parataxis type and are syntactically linked to a verbal (or adjectival or nominal within a verbal construction) root. the complete annotated corpus is available online foot_2 . history textbooks constitute a specific textual genre, as the enunciator's engagement toward the truth and factuality of the described events is of particular interest, and as they are not axiologically neutral. moreover, variations may exist among textbooks depending on factors such as educational level and the specific editorial competition of certain periods, which can be observed through the analysis of enunciative operations and the enunciator's engagement. ## conclusion the annotation schema we propose offers a framework for capturing the wide range of enunciative strategies underlying every enunciation process by which an enunciator actualizes a predicative content. this schema focuses on two important global categories relevant for describing the ways an enunciator positions in relation to the truth value and the axiological value of a predicative content: engagement -notion most frequently used in works that refer to appraisal theory (e.g. @xcite ) -and non-engagement -notably absent from appraisal approach-. when a lot of non-engagement textual units are highlighted in a text (or in a corpus of texts), it underlines a phenomenon in which the enunciator "fades away". we illustrated this phenomenon here by comparing history lessons from two corpora. more generally, our frame of analysis allows for the description of enunciative profiles and compare them between diverse corpora. future work may extend this approach to other genres and corpora, and leverage the schema's potential for training nlp models in tasks such as toxic speech detection, as in @xcite and ideological content analysis.