A Contrastive Analysis Of Appraisal Resources In English And Chinese Book Reviews On Linguistics

The academic book review(henceforth ABR),as one sub-genre of academic discourse,is a critical introduction and evaluation of the books under review in terms of the contents,qualities,and theoretical and practical values.Despite the rich appraisal resources,the book review(henceforth BR)is one somewhat neglected genre in linguistic studies.Therefore,it is worth further studies.Appraisal Theory is an extension of functional model of interpersonal meanings at the lexico-grammatical level and can provide a comprehensive and multi-dimensional model for the analysis of appraisal resources.It is found that the previous studies of appraisal resources are mainly restricted in one culture.Therefore,the present thesis intends to conduct a contrastive analysis of appraisal resources in 10 Chinese and 10 English ABRs on linguistics(CABR and EABR respectively)under the framework of Appraisal Theory.The sample reviewers are collected from prestigious linguistic journals published in China and Western countries respectively.It is intended to find out the similarities and differences in the distributions of appraisal resources.The statistical results show that there exist both similarities and differences in terms of reviewers’ preferences of different appraisal resources.On the whole,the frequency of occurrence scaling from high to low is Engagement,Attitude,and Graduation in both CABR and EABR.Within the domain of Attitude resources,Appreciation takes up the highest proportion while Affect takes up the lowest in both CABR and EABR.A closer examination of the source of Affect resources demonstrates that English reviewers are more direct and subjective in expressing their emotions.As regards Judgement subcategories,more social esteem are employed than social sanction in both BRs,although there are more social sanction in EABR.At the more delicate level,Capacity takes up the main part in both BRs.As Judgement points directly towards book authors which have high interpersonal stakes,more positive Judgement are found in both BRs than negative Judgement.Within the system of Appreciation,Valuation takes up the largest part in both BRs as both reviewers pay attention to the social significance of reviewed works.It is also found that there are more Reaction in EABR and more Composition in CABR,which demonstrates that English reviewers tend to express their emotional reactions directly while Chinese reviewers pay more attention to the proportionality and detail of reviewed works.When the polarity is taken into consideration,it can be seen that most positive Appreciation resources are construed as Valuation.As for negative Appreciation,English reviewers tend to use negative Valuation while Chinese reviewers tend to use negative Composition.This reveals that English reviewers are more direct in evaluation while Chinese reviewers take authors’ face into consideration.Besides,although both Chinese and English reviewers prefer to use more positive Attitude,Chinese reviewers tend to use more positive Attitude than their English counterparts.This demonstrates that English reviewers are more critical in evaluation.In the discussion of Engagement,more Heterogloss are found than Monogloss in both BRs.Dialogic Contraction are more distributed than Dialogic Expansion.It can be seen that both reviewers tend to highlight their own value positions.The statistics also reveal that there are more Dialogic Contraction in EABR,which means English reviewers leave less space for readers to argue or negotiate.In the discussion of Graduation,Force takes the largest part in both BRs.A further discussion of Force reveals that more Raise are used in both BRs as an indication of maximal investment in the value position and strong alignment with readers into it.It is also found that more Raise are used with positive attitudes while more Lower are used with negative attitudes in both BRs.In terms of Focus,English reviewers use more Sharpen to maximally invest in the value position.Chinese reviewers tend to use more Soften with positive attitudes to make evaluations less direct and more objective while English counterparts use all the Soften with negative attitudes to reduce the contradictions.The present contrastive analysis of book reviews under the framework of Appraisal Theory proves that Appraisal Theory is effective in the analysis of Chinese discourses although it is proposed based on the analysis of English texts.Moreover,this study will also provide enlightenment in the field of book review reading,writing and teaching for novice writers and foreign language learners.