A Positive Discourse Analysis On The Definition Of Animal Metaphor Words From The Viewpoint Of Appraisal Theory

As a supplement to Critical Discourse Analysis,Positive Discourse Analysis adopts a positive attitude to analyze discourse,and conveys positive thoughts.In the studies of Positive Discourse Analysis,Appraisal Theory is an important analytical tool for Positive Discourse Analysis,which explores the attitudes and positions of the evaluators in discourse.It analyzes the appraisal resources in discourse to study the meaning that speakers give to appraisal objects through language.The animal metaphor words in the learning dictionaries have unique word formation and metaphorical meanings.At present,most of the researches on animal metaphor words are based on ontology,and there are not many researches on the analysis of dictionary definitions based on Appraisal Theory.This study takes animal metaphor words as the research objects,and selects Collins Advanced English Learning Dictionary as the closed corpus,exhaustively counts the animal metaphor words appearing in it,analyzes and summarizes its collection of animal metaphor words,analyzes and studies the definitions of animal metaphor words in this dictionary based on various systems of Appraisal Theory,and put forward optimization suggestions based on multi-dimensional definition theory.This paper finds:1)In the discourse of animal metaphor words’ definitions in Collins Advanced English Learning Dictionary,attitude resources appear most frequently,followed by graduation resources,and finally engagement resources.Positive discourse is far greater than negative discourse,which shows that the definition of animal metaphor words is very similar to Positive Discourse Analysis,and negative resources are isolated phenomena.Dictionary editors tend to choose words with strong positive meanings to define animal metaphor words,so as to ensure that the positive meanings of the words themselves can be conveyed as much as possible.2)Although the definitions of animal metaphor words in this dictionary have obvious objectivity,the dictionary compilers still have subjective bias in the process of definitions,which,to some extent,reduces the authority and credibility of the definition of animal metaphor words.3)There are still some problems in the definitions of animal metaphor words in Collins Advanced English Learning Dictionary,such as insufficient words’ meaning collection,incomplete definition,or the possibility of negative meaning transmission and so on.Based on the needs of user language acquisition and the framework of Appraisal Theory,this study aims to quantitatively investigate the frequency distribution of appraisal resources of definitions of animal metaphor words in Collins Advanced English Learning Dictionary,and expects to investigate the characteristics and defects of learning dictionaries in animal metaphor words’ definition.Besides,this study also tries to find out the reasons for the emergence of the definition mode of animal metaphor words in learning dictionaries.At last,under the guidance of multi-dimensional definition theory,this study is committed to improving the definition mode of animal metaphor words in learning dictionaries,with a view to promoting the perfection of the compilation of learning dictionaries in the future.