Discourse Analysis Of The Four Gospels From The Perspective Of Appraisal

The Bible has always been regarded as the most remarkable piece of literature the world has ever seen, and it has a tremendous effect on the writings of a great number of authors around the world. Up to now, the New Testament has been approached by all means ever since its completion over two thousand years ago. Jesus, as the Messiah predicted in the Old Testament, is the son of God. During his lifetime-thirty three years in the world, he has managed to manifest God's love and great salvation. All his words are faithfully recorded by his four disciples-Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, who are the authors of the Four Gospels in the New Testament.The present thesis aims to explore the features of appraisal resources in Jesus'words in the Four Gospels by applying Martin's Appraisal Theory, which includes three sub-systems: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation.Appraisal Theory, first proposed by Martin in the early 1990s, is an extended development of interpersonal meaning in systemic functional linguistics and it provides us with a new framework to interpret interpersonal meaning in the discourse. The Four Gospels is full of attitudes and appraisals that Jesus offers toward declaration of God's will. Thus, the Appraisal Theory, which is of great practical value, presents us a proper framework to interpret the interpersonal meaning in the Four Gospels. The Four Gospels, which the Appraisal Theory has not been applied to, becomes a new type of material to check its interpretive power.For the achievement of a more objective conclusion, the corpus was tagged by AnnoTool and then we used concordance tool of AntConc to do the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the distribution features of appraisal resources. We come to the conclusion that Jesus'words in the Four Gospels display a positive ideological position, and such a conclusion is based on three main aspects: firstly, positive attitudes are predominant in Jesus'words and play an important role in abridging the interpersonal gap; secondly, in the model of Graduation, the upscaling values greatly outnumber the downscaling ones. By upscaling values, Jesus stresses his positive attitude and by downscaling values, he tries to make his evaluation less harsh or offensive by lowering his negative attitude; thirdly, resources of Dialogistic Contraction in Engagement system are extensively adopted to help Jesus well negotiate his positive ideological position by suppressing other voices.After a detailed analysis by applying Appraisal Theory to the Four Gospels, we find that Jesus effectively makes use of various appraisal resources in his words to express his positive attitudinal meanings, so that he has performed his legendary life in making an increasing number of people believe him as the Son of God.