A Study Of The Attitudinal Features In Movie Reviews From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

With the rapid development of mass media, media discourse has caught the linguists' attention and becomes an important field of study. However, the related studies are mainly concerned with news discourse, including news reports, news commentaries, editorials, news interviews and so on. As one kind of media discourse, movie reviews have not caught enough attention. The present research is an attempt to explore the attitudinal features in movie reviews from the perspective of Appraisal Theory. The data for the present study are 100 movie review texts selected from Online Film Critics Society (OFCS), totaling 84,575 words. The movies under review are twenty winners of Oscar Academy Awards ranging from the year 1999 to the year 2008. And these movies cover four genres:drama, comedy, adventure, and animation. The methodology used in this study includes both qualitative and statistical analyses. In order to facilitate the coding and analysis of the evaluative resources and statistics of the results, the UAM CorpusTool 2.6 is used in this study. AntConc 3.2.1 is also used to retrieve the major evaluative lexemes that realize different kinds of attitudinal meanings.The overall aim of the present study is to investigate how the professional movie reviewers successfully express their attitudes towards the newly released movies through the strategic management of the complex evaluative resources, and how they promote the development of their attitudes. In order to find the answers to the above questions, this study mainly covers the following three aspects:the semantic features of attitude, the prosodic patterns of attitude, and the modulations of attitude.The analysis of the semantic features of attitude in movie reviews is made from three perspectives:the type of attitude, the mode of attitude and the loading of attitude. The analytical results show that in terms of the type of attitude, the appreciation resources are most frequently adopted by the reviewers, and the judgment resources also play an important role to express the evaluation in movie reviews. On the contrary, the affect resources are less frequently adopted by the reviewers to express their attitudes. In terms of the mode of attitude, most of the attitudes in movie reviews are expressed in an inscribed way. In terms of the loading of attitude, the positive evaluation is much more than the negative one.In addition to the study of the general semantic features of attitude, the present study further investigates the semantic features of the three subsystems of Attitude. Within the subsystem of Affect, un/happiness occupies the highest percentage, dis/satisfaction is the lowest in percentage, and in/security is in between. In terms of the loading of affect, the negative affect is a little more than the positive one. In terms of the emoters of affect, the affect resources are mainly adopted to express the characters', reviewers'and audiences' emotional feelings. Most of the affect resources are adopted to depict the characters' feelings which serve as the introduction of the plots. Only a few affect resources are adopted to express the evaluation of the movies under review. The judgement resources are mainly adopted to evaluate the characters', directors', and actors'/actresses'behavior. All the five kinds of judgement resources mainly target the characters. Only capacity resources play an important role in evaluating the directors'and the actors'/actresses'behavior. Among all these resources, the capacity and the propriety resources are mostly adopted by the reviewers, and they form an opposite pair to express the judgement of the different characters'behavior. Appreciation of a movie is usually realized through the reaction resources. Both the reaction and the valuation resources are frequently adopted to express the positive appreciation of a movie, while the composition resources are usually adopted to express the negative appreciation of a movie. All these three kinds of the appreciation resources mainly target a movie either as a whole or a part. They are also adopted to evaluate the related entities involved in the plot of a movie or in movie reviews.In terms of the prosodic patterns of attitude, this study is also made from three perspectives:the type of attitude, the loading of attitude and the structure of attitude development. In terms of the type of attitude, movie reviews show a radiation prosodic pattern with appreciation as the core of the Attitude system; in terms of the loading of attitude, movie reviews usually show a wave pattern with both positive and negative attitudes, and sometimes, they show a smooth pattern with only positive attitudes or negative attitudes; and in terms of the structure of attitude development, at the evaluation stage, movie reviews usually show a rhombus pattern, domination pattern, accumulation pattern or parallel pattern. In addition, at the Introduction stage, there is a special pattern of attitude development:the foreground pattern. At the stage of Plot Description, the attitude development usually shows a parallel pattern, and sometimes, it shows a domination pattern. These prosodic patterns form a harmonious unity to promote the development of the attitudes and help the reviewers to fulfill their communicative purposes.The study of the modulations of attitude shows that the engagement resources play an important role to modulate the dialogic space of different voices, to make clear the reviewers'own viewpoints and establish their authorities in their community, and moreover to reduce the potential challenges of the opposite voices, and strengthen the persuasion of their reviews. The graduation resources can modulate the forces of attitude to help the reviewers to express their attitudes in a more accurate way, and thus weaken or strengthen the alignment with the readers or other reviewers who hold different viewpoints.All the above attitudinal features are closely related to the communicative purposes of movie reviews. The general communicative purposes detennine the overall attitudinal features in movie reviews. And they are achieved through a series of purposeful activities. The different communicative purposes at different stages determine the specialty of the attitudinal features, and the achievement of the concrete communicative purposes contributes to the achievement of the final communicative purposes.The present study provides new insights into the study of movie reviews and it is significant to movie review writing. The detailed analysis of the semantic features of attitude in movie reviews is helpful for the movie review writers to appropriately adopt different kinds of attitude resources to express the evaluation of a movie according to their communicative purposes. The study of the attitudinal prosodic patterns provides us with the typical and non-typical patterns of attitude development in movie reviews. This can help the review writers to have a good understanding of how to promote the development of the attitudes in the whole movie reviews and at their different stages. The study of the Engagement system and the Graduation system complements the study of the Attitude system. Both the engagement resources and the graduation resources play important roles to modulate the expression of the reviewers' attitudes. This enlightens the review writers to make strategic choices of the attitude resources,6engagement resources and graduation resources to appropriately express their attitudes towards a movie.