An Evaluation Study Of Book Reviews In English Newspapers

Language can be used to express certain feelings, attitudes, and stances in addition to conveying information and representing the world. Because of the universality and importance of evaluation, scholars have tried to describe and explain it from different perspectives and with different methods. Among all these efforts, the appraisal theory which is developed in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics has been widely applied to many kinds of mass media genres in recent years. According to this theory, the appraisal system in language can be divided into three subsystems, that is, attitude, engagement, and graduation. Appraisal theory is relatively systematic, for it has provided a reasonable typology of all the major evaluative functions of language; it is also very easy to apply, for researchers can use it directly to analyze texts. Within the basic framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics and appraisal theory, this study intends to conduct an evaluation analysis of 90 book reviews published by four major English broadsheet newspapers (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph), aiming at revealing the evaluative features of this genre at lexical, grammatical and discourse levels as well as establishing a comprehensive model of evaluation analysis.Martin has defined genre as a staged, goal oriented social process. It is believed in this study that there is a close connection between a specific genre and its evaluation pattern. To achieve a certain communicative goal, the selection and configuration of certain resources of evaluation must display a certain pattern rather than being totally random. To prove this point, this study has conducted a detailed analysis of the evaluative features of newspaper book reviews in the following respects. First of all, features of the three subsystems of appraisal (attitude, engagement and graduation) have been analyzed. Take the attitude subsystem for example, the features to be analyzed include which evaluators and targets of evaluation are involved, the coordination between explicit and implicit attitudes, the coordination between positive and negative attitudes, the most frequently adopted semantic categories, and so on. Besides, proportions of the subcategories of attitude, engagement and graduation are calculated and interpreted, and it is found that these proportions are to a great extent determined by the social context and communicative goal of this specific genre. Secondly, the major lexico-grammatical realizations of the three subsystems (especially attitude) in newspaper book reviews have been identified. It is found that the most common type of realization for affect and judgment is Nominalization; while a great proportion of appreciation values are realized by Epithets. Besides, the evaluative patterns and local grammar of evaluation proposed by Hunston and Sinclair have been applied to the analysis of evaluation at the sentential level in newspaper book reviews. Thirdly, the Generic Structure Potential theory proposed by Hasan and the theory of schematic structure proposed by Martin have been applied to the analysis of generic structure of newspaper book reviews, and the distribution of appraisal resources across generic structure has also been discussed.This study is significant in the following ways:Firstly, a thorough evaluation study of the book reviews published in English newspapers has been conducted, which can be viewed as a contribution to the functional linguistic study of mass media texts. In Britain and America, the book review, which is a special type of feature article, is an indispensable component of modern newspaper. It is multi-functional, not only providing an information service for the readers and an opportunity to gain reputation for the reviewers, but also serving as a major device for attracting advertisements from publishers. Since the basic communicative goal of newspaper book reviews is for the reviewer to express his personal opinion of a recently published book (novel, biography or history book), they usually contain numerous evaluation resources. But up till now, there have been few attempts to study the evaluative features of this genre systematically, and this study intends to do something in this respect.Secondly, an effective comprehensive mode of applying appraisal theory to discourse analysis has been put forward. Besides using appraisal theory to reveal the features of subsystems and subcategories of appraisal in newspaper book reviews, ideas about evaluative patterns and local grammar of evaluation have also been adopted to analyze evaluation at the sentential level. Furthermore, the distribution pattern of appraisal resources across the generic structure of this genre has been examined. This kind of comprehensive mode of analysis can improve the current mode of evaluation study.Thirdly, not only are the evaluative functions of all kinds of evaluation resources analyzed in context, but also the frequencies and proportions of values belonging to various subcategories within the appraisal system are calculated with the help of corpus software (WordSmith 4.0), and these data are tentatively interpreted by referring to contextual information and the communicative goal of this genre.