The concept of appraisal in Bakhtin’s Circle studies: the inter-relationship between ideology and language

Abstract

The present essay aims at discussing the concept of appraisal in the writings of Bakhtin’s Circle. To do so, we revisit the Circle works by seeking to demonstrate the constitutive relationship between this concept and the concepts of ideology and language. The research leads us to understand the appraisal as social value indexes and ideology as the axiological horizon of the discourse, while understanding the utterances and the discourse genres as the materialization of appraisal and ideology. The study is is based on the review of literature and aims at helping to understand the concept of appraisal and its relation to the concepts of ideology and language, among other aspects, which are engendered in Bakhtin’s work.