Appraisal Meanings Of English Comment Adjuncts And Their Motivations

In verbal communication, the speaker generally expresses his or her attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the propositions/proposals that he or she is talking about. Comment Adjuncts in English (henceforth Comment Adjuncts), as a device to convey the speaker's attitude, viewpoint or feelings, are therefore pervasive in both spoken and written discourses. Though research on Comment Adjuncts has a long history, there still lacks a systematic study on Comment Adjuncts from the perspective of the Appraisal Systems. APPRAISAL Systems, as a new theoretical framework, deal with the appraisal resources in discourse and extend the SFL account of the interpersonal by attending to three interacting systems --- ATTITUDE, ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION so as to expound theinterpersonal meanings of the speaker's feelings, attitude, viewpoint and so forth. The APPRAISAL Systems may be of assistance to explore the appraisal meanings of Comment Adjuncts, whereas it is not the case when delving into the reasons why appraisal meanings can be realized by Comment Adjuncts. The concept of subjectivity is first employed in the philosophical field and then widely applied to linguistic studies since the 80s of the twentieth century. In fact, the engagement system and the attitude system are more or less concerned with subjectivity. Therefore, the subjectivity theory is adopted in this dissertation so as to reveal the motivations for the appraisal meanings of Comment Adjuncts. As a lexicogrammatical device to convey the speaker's attitude, viewpoint or feelings, Comment Adjuncts are actually encodings of'the speaker's imprint'in the language. In this sense, the subjectivity theory, which can help to lay a more powerful foundation for the research on Comment Adjuncts, is a beneficial supplement to APPRAISAL Systems.Based on our observations of authentic instances, this dissertation explores the appraisal meanings of Comment Adjuncts, namely the meanings of attitude, engagement and graduation, and their subjectivity motivations. The theoretical foundations are chiefly the APPRAISAL Systems within the paradigm of the systemic functional linguistics and the subjectivity theory. This dissertation is designed to set the following four objectives straight:(1) What are the attitudinal meanings Comment Adjuncts have in various communicative contexts? As an important device to convey the speaker's attitude, viewpoint or feelings, the research on their attitudinal meanings is undoubtedly a vital issue to be dealt with in the present study.(2) The attitude may be the speaker's own or it may be attributed to some other source. So the third question is to do with how Comment Adjuncts are applied by the speaker to accommodate various degrees of commitment to the propositions. Or what are the engagement functions of Comment Adjuncts? And in what ways are these functions embodied?(3) Since graduation is a fundamental feature of both the attitude system and the engagement system, the graduation meanings of Comment Adjuncts are addressed after the investigations of their attitudinal meanings and engagement meanings. To be specific, our aim here is to explore the ways in which the attitudinal meanings and engagement meanings are scaled along the continuum ranging from low to high values.(4) Comment Adjuncts can convey the speaker's attitudinal meaning, engagement meaning and graduation meaning. Then it is necessary to find out the reasons why appraisal meanings can be realized by Comment Adjuncts. Or what are the motivations for the appraisal meanings of Comment Adjuncts? After the careful and thorough exploration of Comment Adjuncts, the key research questions are answered and the conclusions are drawn as follows:Firstly, so far, there still lacks an explicit and universal definition on Comment Adjuncts. The functional definition of Comment Adjuncts is, therefore, put forward at the beginning of the present study, viz. Comment Adjuncts are the kind of adjuncts which express the speaker's attitude towards the proposition/proposal as a whole. Being an evaluative device, Comment Adjuncts form a relationship of appraising and being appraised with clauses related to them. In other words, Comment Adjuncts bear the function of commenting on the propositions/proposals that the speaker is talking about. Based on their semantic features, Comment Adjuncts can be classified into four categories: attitudinal adjuncts, inferential adjuncts, evidential adjuncts and stylistic adjuncts. Each category can be subdivided into different classes. Comment Adjuncts may be realized by words, phrases or clauses. By doing so, the formal categorization of Comment Adjuncts is fully realized in the present study.Secondly, the interpersonal meaning of Comment Adjuncts bears a close relationship with the attitude system of the APPRAISAL Systems, which deals with the speaker's positive or negative evaluation on people, behavior and things. Comment Adjuncts may take on the meanings of affect, judgment and appreciation on the basis of the attitude subsystem. These three categories of affect, judgment and appreciation are interrelated and interchangeable. Thus in the evaluating process, one type of appraisal meaning may be converted into another one. In other words, the expression of affect implies the judgment on behavior or the appreciation of things, and can be invoked by the judgment on behavior and the appreciation of things reversely.Thirdly, the interpersonal meaning of Comment Adjuncts is also closely related to the semantics of engagement, which is concerned with the relations between the speaker and various propositions/proposals in discourse. By using Comment Adjuncts, the speaker's attitude can be adjusted, the validity of utterance verified and the potential interaction in discourse revealed. At the same time, the speaker's unidirectional information-providing turns into a dialogue between the speaker and the hearer, and the role of the hearer changes from passive information-receiving into active information-sharing and information-exchanging. The engagement meaning of Comment Adjuncts lies in two aspects: dialogic expansion and dialogic contraction. The distinction turns on the degree to which an utterance, by dint of one or more of these locutions, actively makes allowances for dialogically alternative positions and voices (dialogic expansion), or alternatively, acts to challenge, fend off or restrict the scope of such (dialogic contraction).Fourthly, the semantics of graduation extends across the whole APPRAISAL Systems rather than being limited to any subsystem. It is a general property of values of affect, judgment and appreciation that they construe greater or lesser degrees of positivity or negativity. The gradability of attitudinal meaning is mainly realized by the force-adjusting, namely turning up or down the'volume'of the attitudinal meaning. Gradability is also a distinctive feature of the engagement system. The meaning which is scaled will vary from dialogic expansion to dialogic contraction, though, more broadly, engagement values scale for the degree of the speaker's intensity, or the degree of their investment in the utterance. The gradability of engagement values is primarily embodied in both force-adjusting and focus-adjusting.Finally, in systemic functional linguistics, language is regarded as a resource for making meaning, an indefinitely expandable source of meaning potentials. When expressing a certain meaning, the speaker needs to make choices in the network system according to different contexts. In verbal communication, the speaker often conveys his or her subjective evaluation of things as well as making an objective description of things. Among various evaluative devices at different levels of phonology, lexicogrammar and discourse, Comment Adjuncts are an important lexicogrammatical device which can be employed to realize the speaker's intersubjectivity as well as the speaker's subjectivity, namely the speaker's perspective, affect and epistemic status towards the propositions. Furthermore, the speaker's subjective degree can be viewed as a continuum ranging from low to high values which will vary according to the types of Comment Adjuncts, context and their different syntactic positions in clauses. In a nutshell, the meanings of attitude, engagement and graduation, in fact, are realizations of'the speaker's imprint'in the language which are affected by the speaker's epistemic status, emotions, communicative intentions, social context and so forth. That is to say, the appraisal meanings of Comment Adjuncts are motivated by the speaker's subjectivity.By applying the subjectivity theory and APPRAISAL Systems, this investigation brings a new theoretical perspective to researches on Comment Adjuncts, and it also enriches the connotation of subjectivity and deepens researches on subjectivity. In addition, it may be of practical value to verbal communicative exchanges and English teaching. However, limitations remain in the present research field and methodology. Therefore, further studies should be conducted in these two facets in the future.