A Study On The Appraisal Words In Harvard Business Review Texts Based On Appraisal Theory

This thesis, from the perspective of Appraisal Theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics, aims to analyze business review texts selected from Harvard Business Review, a prestigious magazine in economics, finance and other related business fields, to find the distribution of appraisal words and how business reviewers apply linguistic resources to negotiate affect, judgement and appreciation, and how to engage and graduate the semantic contents.According to the three subsystems of Appraisal Theory, both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in the thesis with the aid of the professional statistical instrument AntConc to analyze the characteristics of appraisal words in 18 Harvard Business Review texts (12,639 words). Through analysis, it can be found that engagement words take up the highest frequency, followed by attitude and graduation words. As for attitude analysis, most cases of them are judgement, and appreciation words account for a higher proportion than affect words. Among engagement words, intra-vocalization and dialogistic expansion words outnumber extra-vocalization and dialogistic contraction words. The two subcategories within graduation have extremely unbalanced distributions, that is, force is used much more frequently than focus, and most of the cases concern force-raising and focus-sharpening (grading-up words).The thesis attempts to provide a new perspective to help readers of business review understand the role that appraisal words play in the construction of the text, and hence know the writers' position better. And it also provides insights into business reviews' reading. Furthermore, as a scientific foundation for understanding business reviews, the thesis will definitely be of better-instruction for the teaching and reading of media texts. As the appraisal meaning is closely related with the ideological position and cultural pattern, the analysis in the thesis sometimes has subjectivity unavoidably, which is also the limitation of cross-cultural study on business reviews.