On Attitudinal Meanings In The Discourse Of Business Review-An Appraisal Perspective

The dissertation aims to analyze the attitudinal meaning of business review texts from Harvard Business Review, a prestigious magazine in economics, finance and other related business fields, using the framework of appraisal system in Systemic Functional Linguistics with a view to revealing what linguistic elements realize the appraisal meaning and especially what attitudinal values is the given weight to in the discourse of business reviews.The appraisal system is developed along the lineage of research on the interpersonal meaning in language. In Systemic Functional Linguistics, the discussion concerning "attitudes" is limited to comment adjunct, and Halliday covers all the attitudinal resources by introducing the interpersonal metaphor. The appraisal framework extends the scope of the attitudinal research in Systemic Functional Linguistics. And after 15 years of study, Professor Martin and Doctor White has updated and modified their model of the appraisal framework in their latest publication The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. According to Martin and White (2005), evaluation is used to express speakers' or writers' opinion, and in doing so to reflect the value system of those persons and their community. The appraisal framework divided the value system into three sub-categories: attitude, engagement, and graduation. Attitudes can be those of the writer's, or those built in the discourse, or those of the attributed sources, which are investigated from the emotional, ethical and aesthetic perspectives in the appraisal framework. The category of engagement is concerned with the diverse range of resources by which speakers/writers adjust and negotiate the arguability of their utterances. Graduation is concerned with values which scale other meanings along two possible parameters---either locating them on a scale from low to high intensity, or from core to marginal membership of a category. Altogether, the framework provides techniques for the systematic analysis of evaluation and stance as they operate in whole texts and in groupings of texts from any register. It is concerned with the social function of the appraisal resources, not simply as the means by which individual speakers/writers express their feelings and take stands, but as the meanings by which they engage with socially-determined value positions and thereby can form alliances with those who don't.Evaluation is a central part of the meaning of most of the texts. Business review texts, which are the comments and opinions of the various writers on the opinion page, are no exception. Presumably, they are quite abundant in appraisal resources, and it must be rewarding to investigate this genre. Both qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches are applied in the dissertation in an attempt to demonstrate the attitudinal meanings in business review texts. To make things clear, a total of 234 articles were chosen and downloaded from Harvard Business Review internet resources from September 2005 to August 2006.With respect to the titles in business reviews, it is discovered that noun and verb phrases take up a much higher percentage than clauses, or minor sentences. Among the noun phrases used as titles, only one third carry appraising items as a token of the writer's attitude. Most of the appraising items reflect the writer's judgment and appreciation rather than affect. In addition, nearly 90% of the verb phrases consist of material process of action taken in various business fields. As far as their attitudinal implication is concerned, nine out of ten of all the material processes are of positive appraisal, suggesting favorable opinion of the writer concerning these actions. It is also found that while using clauses, there is a prevailing trend for business writers to favor questions over statements so as to arouse readers'interest as well as to convey personal inclination. The proportion of interrogations to statements is 2.5 to 1.Concerning business review texts, analyses of attitude indicate a strong preference across all the texts for attitude expressed as appreciation and judgment rather than affect. That is to say, the writers of business reviews are more concerned with the human behavior and objective world than the emotional field.Secondly, the three writers of business reviews, irrespective of their gender, show a similar willingness to evaluate explicitly. As to judgment values, implicit positive judgment is the smallest in number; through the analysis of the social sanction judgment and social esteem judgment, it's been found that the commentator voice is applied in the business review texts. As to appreciation, aesthetic appreciation is fewer than non-aesthetic appreciation. In most cases the writers encode appreciation as valuation (construing meaning of significance, usefulness or worth). Composition is the smallest in number in the attitude encoded as appreciation in the discourse of business reviews.Finally, the resources of the appraisal meaning are mainly on the lexical layer. However, comparisons and contrasts are found conveying the interpersonal meaning of the implicit negative judgment type. Sometimes, writers also make use of personal pronouns to suggest implicit judgment value.The analysis of business review texts plays an important role in the understanding of business texts. Furthermore, the analysis of the texts benefits cross-cultural communication and the teaching of media texts. As the appraisal meaning is closely related with the ideological position and culture, the analysis will definitely enable us to be better-informed about the expression of evaluative meaning in the English language and thus contributes to the understanding of the underlying meaning of media texts.This dissertation consists of five chapters. Chapter One introduces the reasons for choosing the business review texts. Chapter Two deals with previous research on attitude or stance in discourse. Chapter Three is concerned with the theoretical framework applied in the dissertation. Chapter Four analyzes the attitudinal meanings in the data. Chapter Five concludes the dissertation by summing up the major findings and also points out the significance and limitations of the present research.