A Corpus-based Study Of Affect In Friends

Affect is the mental experience of the world. Besides experiencing emotions, human can as well express and discuss emotions and feelings. In Appraisal system, Affect refers to all the lexico-grammatical resources construing emotions, moods, feelings and dispositions. Martin & White (2005:46) call the conscious participant experiencing the emotion an Emoter, and the phenomenon responsible for that emotion a Trigger.The way of expressing emotions and feelings is not universal but bears cross-cultural differences. The social norms for Affect use are systemically different across cultures, suggesting we people have an ingrained system for expressing our emotions and attitudes. In other words, specific expressions of Affect are shaped by culture and custom. In recent years, with the process of mass culture and the acceleration of cultural globalization, China is paying more and more attention to foreign cultural forms. Especially with the rapid development of Internet, Chinese audiences are getting more access to American movies, TV series, reality shows, talk shows and the like. The author intends to take the worldwide popular American situation comedy (sitcom) Friends as an example and analyze the affectual resources in it by adopting both qualitative and quantitative approaches to help people, to a certain degree, understand better the evaluative meaning of the language and thus feel more related to the culture manifested in this sitcom.Appraisal Theory proposed by Martin and his colleagues is a new approach to discourse analysis in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) with a purpose to explore the evaluative meaning of a text. It is concerned with the types of attitudes, the graduation of feelings, and the management of interpersonal relationships in texts. This newly developed theory developing from the Interpersonal framework of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics consists of three sub-categories: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, of which Attitude is the core system, which can be further divided into three sub-categories: Affect, Judgement and Appreciation. This paper makes an attempt to ascertain and analyze affectual resources in the American sitcom Friends based on the relevant theories of one of the sub-categories of Attitude-Affect system. The current study chooses 24 episodes of Season 2 from Friends (with a total number of 77,586 words). Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed to carry out the analysis of the situation comedy discourse with the help of UAM CorpusTool and AntConc.Based on the statistics drawn from the corpus, the target texts are full of affectual resources, determined basically by the characteristics of the language in situation comedy. Affect is classified into 6 different systems of oppositions. Among these 6 categories of Affect system, positive Affect, mental-state Affect, realis Affect, authorial Affect account respectively for 60.23%,86.85%,83.91%, and 57.75% in opposition to negative Affect, behavioral-surge Affect, irrealis Affect, and unauthorial Affect of 39.77%,13.15%,16.09 %, and 42.25%. In terms of directed vs. undirected and low vs. high, there exist minor differences, the proportions of which are respectively 50.68% vs.49.32% and 55.71% vs.44.29%. According to the statistics, in this situation comedy, positive Affect, mental-state Affect, realis Affect and authorial Affect are employed more to express emotions and to arouse emotional resonance, while negative Affect, behavioral-surge Affect, irrealis Affect and unauthorial Affect are less used. The frequencies of directed Affect and undirected Affect are similar; and the difference between the proportions of low Affect and high Affect is not that conspicuous as well. The statistics are yielded by UAM CorpusTool, but due to the exertion of different cultures or concrete contexts of situation on the distinction between each system of oppositions, it is sometimes difficult to be certain of what kind of Affect they belong to.The current study also makes a distinction between feel Affect and be Affect. According to the statistics by AntConc, adjectives in the be-pattern are used far more frequently to express Affect than those in the feel-pattern. What also needs to be noticed is that adjectives appeared in the be-pattern do not necessarily refer to emotions or feelings while they express affectual meaning in the feel-pattern, and therefore it entails extra work to ascertain affectual values among all the concordance hits in the software AntConc. Apart from adjectives, verbs, adverbs and nominalizations can also realize affectual meaning. The realizations of Affect through adverbs and verbs are analyzed on a level of syntax in the current study. This thesis presents a corpus-based analysis of the expressions of Affect in Friends under the framework of Appraisal Theory by means of statistical tools UAM CorpusTool and AntConc, with a view to bringing new light to other genres and making a contribution to the application of Affect system in the analysis of sitcom discourse. What's more, it makes an attempt to provide implications in terms of theoretical and practical significance, discourse analysis, and stylistic and pedagogical perspectives for future studies.