A Comparative Study Of Attitudes In Chinese And Australian Newspaper Book Reviews

Appraisal Theory is the new development of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics in recent years. It has been widely used in the analysis of various genres. Martin's Appraisal system can be divided into three sub-categories, namely, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, of which Attitude system is the core. Compared with the traditional three meta-functions of language and the traditional Critical Discourse Analysis, Appraisal Theory is more systematic. It provides a systematic and comprehensive mode of analysis. In addition, Appraisal Theory is more practical and can be directly applied to the analysis of different genres.Within the framework of Appraisal Theory, this study selected 10 book reviews from Australia's broadsheets The Australian and 10 book reviews from China's People's Daily as data. Both of the two newspapers are authoritative and popular in their own countries. Based on the analysis of the collected data, this paper made a comparative study of the appraising strategies between Chinese and Australian reviewers. Book review is an indispensable part of broadsheet newspapers. It plays an important role in the modern life. The main communicative purpose of newspaper book reviews is that reviewers briefly describe the content of those newly-published books, and express their personal evaluation or attitude towards them so as to introduce these books to the readers. Therefore, this is abundant appraisal resources in newspaper reviews, in particular, Attitude resources. However, most of the research on reviews from the perspective of Appraisal Theory is restricted to academic book reviews. There are not many comparative studies on newspaper book reviews based on Appraisal Theory.Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis, this study finds that Chinese reviewers and Australian reviewers have both similarities and differences in employing Attitude resources as well as in adopting appraising strategies. Firstly, in terms of the total frequency of attitudinal resources, Australian reviewers use a large number of appraisal resources, while their Chinese counterparts employ fewer attitudinal resources. This difference is not only reflected in the total frequency of attitudinal resources, but also in each sub-category of Attitude, namely, Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. Secondly, both Australian reviewers and Chinese reviewers put their focus on the subcategory of Appreciation and use less Judgment, in particular Affect. Thirdly, the Chinese reviewers tend to avoid explicit or direct negative appraisal. In the Chinese book reviews, there are fewer negative attitudinal expressions. Most of the negative evaluation takes the forms of implicit and indirect appraisal. In contrast, the Australian reviewers tend to employ explicit forms of evaluation. With respect to the comparative study of each subcategory of Attitude, there is also obvious disparity between Chinese and Australian reviews. First, in terms of Judgment, Chinese reviewers show a strong preference for Social Esteem. They almost completely avoid the evaluation of Social Sanction. When we narrow down our focus to Social Esteem, Chinese reviewers then concentrate their assessment on Capacity which means the professional capability and skills of the authors. On the contrary, the Australian reviewers tend to make an all-round Judgment rather than restrict their evaluation only to Social Esteem. Second, in the light of Appreciation, Chinese reviewers focus more on Valuation which is the least personal and subjective. By contrast, the Australian reviewers do not tend to avoid other patterns of Appreciation, such as Reaction and Composition, although they also show preference for Valuation.From the analysis and comparison, it is obvious to see that Chinese reviewers prefer to use appraisal strategies which are less subjective. They tend to avoid explicit evaluation, in particular, explicit negative evaluation. On the contrary, in the process of making assessment, the Australian reviewers do not purposely avoid appraisal strategies which are quite subjective and personal. Instead, they try to make an all-round evaluation.Based on the findings of the study, this paper also tries to find cultural interpretations for differences between Chinese and Australian newspaper book reviews. These differences can be attributed to the differences between Chinese and Australian cultures. Chinese culture is collective in nature, which focuses on interpersonal relationship. It gives priority to social harmony, politeness strategies, social authority, and so on. In contrast, Australian culture, which belongs to Western culture, is individualist in nature, which focuses on the individual person, equality, freedom and the right to speak.In a word, the present research proved that Appraisal Theory is a useful tool for us to interpret attitude of discourses, developed Martin's Appraisal Theory from cross-cultural perspective by comparing Chinese and Western corpus, and provided some guidance to the research of book reviews, especially newspaper book reviews.