| Book reviews deal with the reviewers'critical judgment of the publications, aiming to introduce and evaluate the contents, theoretical values of a book. Apart from the assessment of the book itself, the reviewer has to maintain the harmonious interpersonal relationship with the author and the potential readers. In such a genre characterized by rich and complex interpersonal relations, how to evaluate or appraise is the soul of book reviews. Appraisal system is the extended scope of functional model of interpersonal meanings at the lexico-grammatical level. It is an interpretative theory that focuses on the discourse semantics alongside with the alternations of the speaker's stance with his/her ongoing engagement in the discourses. Thus it is meaningful to apply the Appraisal theory to interpret the appraisal resources distributed in book reviews.On the basis of the Appraisal framework in Systematic Functional Linguistics, this thesis examines 10 English and Chinese book reviews, which have been collected from the prestigious journals in linguistics both in China and Western countries, attempting to analyze the distribution and realization of Appraisal strategies in English and Chinese academic book reviews, to reveal the similarities and differences between them and to explore the reasons underlying the findings. Besides, this thesis aims to shed some light on the development and application of appraisal theory as well as foreign language learning and teaching. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed in the thesis to make contrastive analysis of each sub-system of Appraisal framework-Attitude, Engagement and Graduation as well as their respective sub-categories in detail.The findings of the study are briefed as follows. On the whole, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation take different rates of distribution in both Chinese and English book reviews. In English book reviews, the frequency of occurrence scaling from high to low is engagement, attitude and graduation, while attitude enjoys the highest rate of occurrence in Chinese book reviews. For both sets of book reviews in Chinese and English, appreciation accounts for the largest proportion as against the total number of attitudinal resources, while the frequency of affect ranks the lowest among the three sub-systems of attitude. Besides, both Chinese and English reviewers show more positive attitude than negative attitude in the book reviews in our corpus. Under engagement, the frequency of heteroglossic engagement is higher than that of monoglossic engagement in both English and Chinese book reviews. Under graduation, both English and Chinese reviewers tend to utilize some sharpening words to foreground the positive attitude but apply some softening words to blur negative attitude, yet the Chinese book reviewers show a greater tendency towards the use of sharpening words for positive attitude compared to the English ones. The factors contributive to the resemblance and disparity are also touched upon in the thesis.The contrastive analysis of book reviews within the Appraisal framework plays an important role in the understanding of interpersonal meanings in discourses, and it proves the effectiveness of this theory which is rooted in English in realization of Appraisal meanings in different discourses under various cultural contexts, especially in Chinese discourses. Moreover, this study provides insights into reading and writing book reviews for foreign language learners, and it is hoped that this research can shed a little light on the development of academic evaluation and communication widely.
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