A Corpus-based Study Of Attitude In Visual-verbal Discourse:

The study of attitude is an important part among researches taken under the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Similar to verbal discourse, visual-verbal discourse also expresses certain attitude. However, compared to that in verbal discourse, study of attitude in visual-verbal discourse is just unfolding till recently. This dissertation endeavors to undertake a comprehensive study of characteristics related to the realization of attitude in visual-verbal discourse with100Chinese visual-verbal news commentary as its corpus.On the basis of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Appraisal Theory, a tripartite model to examine the realization of attitude in visual-verbal discourse is constructed, which is a comprehensive study by respectively analyzing the processes of attitude’s representation, modulation and its development in visual-verbal discourse. The study of attitude’s representation reveals those characteristics employed when attitude is represented by visual-verbal resources and the role that visual-verbal interaction plays while attitude is represented. The study of attitude’s modulation shows how attitude is intersubjectively positioned and how its graduation is scaled. The study of attitudinal prosody illustrates how attitude is developed in visual-verbal discourse.A qualitative study of visual-verbal resources for the representation and modulation of attitude is undertaken, which comes out a detailed classification of these resources. Two basic types of visual-verbal interaction are analyzed. In addition, three types of attitudinal prosody, i.e., attitudinal meaning, attitude’s load, and the relationship between micro attitude and authorial position, are discussed. Based on the construction of the tripartite model and the qualitative analysis, an annotation scheme is designed and applied to our corpus, after which a comprehensive statistical analysis of the annotated corpus is conducted. Major findings are listed as follows:(a) Attitude’s representation. Affect is uncommon in the corpus and most cases of affect both in visual and verbal parts of the corpus are negative affects of the disadvantaged side in news. The majority of judgment belong to authorial judgment, especially those toward negative behaviors and events. As for appreciation, many cases of negative appreciation of quality are found in the corpus. Besides, though there aren’t a number of micro attitudes in cartoons, attitudinal interaction between cartoons and verbal parts of the corpus is quite frequent, especially that between negative authorial judgments.(b) Attitude’s modulation. Monogloss is frequently applied to authorial attitudes and heterogloss to attitudes of both the negative side in news and the third party. The positioning of attitudes of the disadvantaged side in news has not shown any tendency toward neither monogloss nor heterogloss. As for the modulation of graduation, it has shown that there is more modulation of force than that of focus. It is also found that cases of modulation of attitude’s graduation is much more common in cartoons than in verbal parts of the corpus.(c) Attitudinal prosody. As is revealed, the prosody of attitudinal meaning for most individual Chinese new commentary discourse in our corpus belongs to judgment-leading pattern, and the prosody of the load of attitude is mainly negative-load-leading pattern. As for the prosody of the relationship between micro attitude and authorial position, most cases are congruence-leading pattern.All in all, major findings listed above prove that characteristics related to the realization of attitude in Chinese visual-verbal news commentary is oriented toward increasing the persuasive power of corresponding commentary discourse.Main innovation of this dissertation lies in three aspects. First, the range of research on attitude is extended from mono-modal discourse to multimodal discourse. Second, a tripartite model to examine the realization of attitude in visual-verbal discourse is constructed, which is more applicable for the analysis of attitude in visual-verbal discourse. Third, a detailed classification of visual and verbal resources for realizing and modulating attitude is undertaken, which will facilitate further study of attitude in visual-verbal discourse.