Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Language, as a tool, is used for communication in daily life. It carries information for people so that people can make sense what others say. Researches about language have not stopped since hundreds of years ago. Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Today there are two divisions about modern linguistics: Functionalism, guided by anthropology and sociology, and Formalism, based on philosophy and psychology. Formalism studies the abstract forms of language and their internal relations. Functionalism studies the forms of language in reference to their social function in communication (Liu & Wen 2006).
About fifty years ago, Functionalism has gained more eyes in linguistics (Newmeyer 1980). Linguists were obsessed with exploring the functional model about language and discovered many different fields (Martin 1984). Halliday is a pioneer in functional linguistics which stems from Firth’s theories in the London School. His Systemic Functional Grammar is one of the most far-reaching linguistic theories in the 20th century and has an important effect on various fields related to language, such as language teaching, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, stylistics, and machine translation (Liu & Feng 2002). Halliday presented three metafunctions about language: ideational function, interpersonal function, and textual function. The ideational function, including experiential function and logical function, describes human being’s experience and consciousness in the natural world, and is concerned with transitivity, voice and ergativity. The interpersonal function is about the social relations, especially the negotiation between speakers and listeners, and is concerned with mood, modality and key. The textual function is about the flow of the information and is concerned with thematic structure, information structure and cohesion (Huang 2000).
1.2 Rationale of the Study
Why study appraisal in English newspaper movie reviews? Appraisal, as the new development of Systemic Functional Grammar (hereafter SFL), is considered to attend to the interpersonal function of language, which is concerned with the interaction between speakers and listeners in a given context (Halliday 1994). People’s feelings and attitudes towards the world can be reflected by language and can not always be totally objective. People evaluate what they hear or read to judge what they should or want to do, whether they can make friends with others. For example, when somebody says “It is raining now”, he may describe the condition of the weather and express the attitude that he can not go out for a walk at the same time. Appraisal is used to reflect people’s view of life and value, especially the interpersonal meaning which can be construed by appraisal. Actually, appraisal is inevitable and essential in daily communication. Secondly, appraisal can be used at diverse levels of language and achieved by various types of linguistic devices, including lexical level, phonological level and textual level (Wang 2001). In oral communication, people can distinguish the addresser’s positive or negative attitudes or feelings through his intonation. In written discourses, there are various lexical resources and sentence patterns that can reflect the evaluative meaning. Thirdly, the evaluative function of expressions can be different under different contexts. For example, some words that express negative meanings can be
employed to reflect positive attitude in certain contexts. The word “slow” expresses negative meaning most of time, while it refers to a positive approach to dining in the expression the slow food movement against fast food (Martin and White 2005: 52). On the other hand, some words without evaluative meanings can also achieve appraisal in certain contexts (Zhang 2009).
Chapter Two Literature Review
As a new relative theory, Appraisal Theory has attracted more and more attention from linguists. Many studies have been approached from various perspectives. Movie reviews, as a specific genre, have also been analyzed with Appraisal Theory. In this chapter, the author will introduce the previous studies about Appraisal Theory and English newspaper movie reviews.
2.1 Previous Studies on Movie Review
2.1.1 An overview of movie review
According to Wikipedia, movie review, also called film criticism, refers to the analysis and evaluation of movies and movie medium. Generally, it is divided into journalistic movie reviews which appear in newspapers and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic movie reviews which are criticized by movie scholars and are published in academic journals. Working for newspapers, magazines or other Medias, journalistic movie reviews mainly review the latest releases, including the summary and description of the plot, the director’s capacity, the actors’ performance and the opinions of the author. It has an important impact on the decision of whether to see this movie or not. On the other hand, academic reviews, mostly known as film studies or film theory, tend to explore how movies work, why they work and what impact they have. Writers of academic movie review don’t publish their articles on newspapers or magazines but in university presses or up-market magazines. This thesis will research journalistic movie reviews.
Movie reviews have always been a long-standing convention of English newspaper. Newspaper movie review is a persuasive discourse, whose purpose is to convey the writer’s opinion of a movie (Corrigan 2009). In this thesis, newspaper movie reviews will be investigated from the perspective of appraisal. Newspaper movie reviews can be considered as a kind of genre with
communicative aim to provide information and reviewer’s opinions of the released movies. Under the framework of SFL, it is of vital importance to figure out the register of the movie review. According to Halliday (1978:11), register is the configuration of semantic resources that the members of the culture associate with a situation type.
2.2 Previous Studies on Appraisal Theory
2.2.1 The development of Appraisal Theory
For a long time, many linguists focus on language from a certain perspective under the framework of SFL. Interpersonal function, as one of the three metafunctions of language, is concerned with the interaction between the speaker and the listener and the speaker’s attitudes towards what he speaks. It contained a semantic load, which can be realized by multiple means, such as the person system, the attitudinal type of epithet, and the connotative meanings of lexical items (Halliday 1994). The interpersonal meaning expresses the attitude and evaluation mainly from the perspective of mood system and modality.
Evaluation, as the realization of interpersonal function, has been taken into consideration in the discourse analysis. Therefore, a variety of terms and definitions about evaluation have come out, such as ‘affect’ (Ochs & Schieffelin 1989), ‘modality’ (Halliday 1994) and ‘appraisal’ (Martin 2000). Some definitions are given as follows about evaluation:
It can be implied that the definitions above are related to each other and can be used as synonyms. Though different aspects are emphasized on, they all study the interpersonal meaning in language. ‘Appraisal’ is another term to describe the study of evaluation. Martin (1996) studies interpersonal meaning outside the mood system, but from the perspective of the evaluation system (Zhang Delu 1996).
Chapter Three Appraisal Theory ...................... 15
3.1 Attitude .................. 18
3.1.1 Affect ......................... 18
Chapter Four Methodology .................. 37
4.1 Research Questions .............. 37
Chapter Five Appraisal in Newspaper Movie Review ...................... 42
5.1 Characterization of Attitude .......................... 42
Chapter Five Appraisal in Newspaper Movie Review
Appraisal system is put forward by Martin and White (2005) to cover almost all the aspects of evaluation in English language. However, there are various kinds of linguistic realization because of the complication of the evaluation. In order to have a better understanding of how appraisal functions in linguistic communications and develop Appraisal Theory, it is necessary to figure out the function of appraisal resources in different genres. So far, many researches have been made from this perspective, including editorials, history texts, hard news, casual conversations, etc. Newspaper movie reviews, a subtype of feature articles, have been investigated a little. The analysis of newspaper movie reviews in this chapter will be carried out based on Appraisal Theory from various aspects.
5.1 Characterization of Attitude
As is mentioned in Chapter Four, there are three subcategories in attitude system, including affect, judgment and appreciation. Affect refers to the reflection of emotions no matter they are positive or negative; judgment is concerned with the attitudes towards the
behavior of human beings; appreciation deals with evaluating the things involving the text, process, natural phenomena, etc. In this part, the author will give a brief presentation and interpretation of the overall framework of the three subcategories in newspaper movie reviews and detailed analysis of each subcategory.
Chapter Six Conclusion
This thesis has investigated the evaluative characteristics of newspaper movie reviews, which is a kind of genre that seldom explored by former researches from the perspective of Appraisal Theory. In order to make up this deficiency, this investigation is carried out under the framework of Appraisal Theory. In this chapter, the major findings will be demonstrated. On the other hand, the limitations of the present study and suggestions for future studies will be illustrated in the following sections.
6.1 Major Findings
The thesis has come to some conclusions after a detailed analysis on the 20-annotated newspaper movie reviews.
Firstly, the three subsystems of appraisal are all negotiated in newspaper movie reviews. For attitude, the distributions of attitudinal resources are not even, with appreciation the largest proportion; affect the least proportion and judgment in between. The reasons are that the reviewer tends to establish a kind of objective impression for readers so that the readers can be convinced or persuaded by the reviewer. For engagement, it is also not even for the distributions of the subcategories of this subsystem, with the largest proportion being disclaim; then entertain; the following proclaim and the least attribute. This is because of the fact that when evaluating the movie the reviewer usually employs a number of negative and concessive words and resources of entertain rather than quotes what others say. The aim is to align the readers with the reviewer by making space for alternative positions. For graduation, the resources of force have taken up a much larger proportion than those of focus. In the subsystem of
force, the proportion of intensification is also larger than that of quantification. This is because force is more often employed to modify attitudinal resources, while focus is less employed.
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