During recent years there has been a great deal of interest in the various ways in which features of language are used to involve, implicate, entangle or engage a reader with a text. One difficulty lies in trying to quantify such a qualitative concept. Biber and Finegan (1989) have designed a model which seems to be useful for this purpose. This article offers a revised version of this model and then applies it to a representative corpus of the early prose fiction of Mudrooroo,1 a prominent Australian author, in order to test its effectiveness. The findings suggest that although there are certain limitations, the revised version of Biber and Finegan’s basic model is indeed useful for extracting broad stylistic trends of evidentiality and affect which may exist in written, and spoken, texts.
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