Identification Of Evaluative Resources In Modern Chinese Texts

J. R. Martin’s Appraisal Theory is a new system which developed Halliday’s personalfunction of Systematic-Functional Grammar. It focuses on all the negotiable attitudes inEnglish texts and proposed three new semantic systems-Attitude, Engagement and Graduation,which makes the study of personal meaning more systematic. This thesis researches theevaluative resources in Huagai Ji based on the Appraisal System.We made necessary collections before we really set up this title, and found that, on theone hand, since2002there have been abundant researches on Appraisal System both overseasand abroad, among which most were particularly about English texts; on the other hand,despite that Chinese critical articles possess more evaluative resources than other genres, theyhave not been the center study subject up to now. Against that background, we make HuagaiJi our research subject, and the outcome may probably contribute to further research.This thesis integrates other necessary theories to ensure the procedure applicable andlogic. We raise two principles-field principle and language classification principle,respectively, and ways of identifying the evaluative resources. And then, we identify andanalyze the evaluative resources in Huagai Ji. The research shows that metaphor and ironyplay a very important part in the identification process; implicit adjective evaluative resourcestake up a larger share in adjective evaluative resources; when identifying the adjective andnominal adjective evaluative resources, metaphor and irony methods are particularlyimportant. Moreover, by referring to the Appraisal system, this research finds out variousevaluative resources, distributing in vocabulary, sentences and the text. These evaluativeresources feature saturating prosody and diversity.Still, we meet similar problems as the analysis of English texts do when we try toidentify the evaluative resources in Chinese texts, such as the difficulty of identifying processand the intricacies of the texts, which is one of the directions we should switch our attention.