An Appraisal Perspective On The Attitudinal Meanings In Political Column Texts Of Newspapers

The thesis aims to analyze the attitudinal meaning of political column texts of newspaper using the framework of appraisal system in Systemic Functional Linguistics with a view to revealing what linguistic elements realize the appraisal meaning and especially what attitudinal values is the weighting given to in the columnists' expression of political arguments.This thesis first provides a brief account of how the appraisal system is developed along the lineage of research on the interpersonal meaning in language. Interpersonal meaning can be conveyed in many ways. Besides the linguistic resources such as mood, modality and interpersonal metaphor elaborated by Halliday (1994), many researchers have identified new resources of interpersonal meaning. The appraisal framework is a case in point.In Systemic Functional Linguistics, the discussion concerning "attitudes" is limited to comment adjunct, and Halliday (1994) covers all the attitudinal resources by introducing the interpersonal metaphor. The appraisal framework extends the scope of the attitudinal research in Systemic Functional Linguistics.Attitudes and stances are bound up with evaluation, which is always value-laden. Evaluation is used to express speakers' or writers' opinion, and in doing so to reflect the value system of those persons and their community. In the appraisal framework attitude is one of the three subcategories, the other two sub-categories being engagement and graduation. Attitudes can be those of the writer's, or those built in the discourse, or those of the attributed sources. Attitudes are investigated from the following three perspectives, namely, the emotional, ethical and aesthetic perspectives in the appraisal framework.The appraisal resources are the subjective, expressive vocabulary. Conceptually, evaluation has been noted to be comparative and subjective. Identifying evaluation is a question of identifying signals of comparison, subjectivity, and social values.Evaluation is a central part of the meaning of almost any text. Political column texts are the comments and opinions of the columnists on the opinion page, so they must be abundant in appraisal resources, and it must be rewarding to investigate this genre.Both qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches are applied in the thesis in an attempt to demonstrate the attitudinal meanings in political column texts. To make things clear, three political column texts were chosen and downloaded from the Sydney Morning Herald internet resources in May and July of 2004 for the present thesis. The analysis of the political column texts leads to the conclusion that attitudinal values in political column discourse can be conveyed at lexical, clausal, grammatical and textual levels. The findings also include the following: 1. The analysis of attitude also indicates a strong preference across all the texts for attitude expressed as appreciation and judgment rather than affect. That is to say. the columnists are more concerned with the human behavior and objective world than the emotional aspect. 2. The three columnists show a similar willingness to evaluate explicitly. Implicit positive judgment values are the least frequent among the judgment values. 3. Appreciation values see more non-aesthetic types than the aesthetic ones in political column texts. In most cases the writers encode appreciation as valuation (construing meaning of significance, usefulness or worth). In the political column texts the commentator voice is often applied.The analysis of political column texts plays an important role in the understanding of political texts. Furthermore, the analysis of political column texts benefits cross-cultural communication and the teaching of media texts. As the appraisal meaning is closely related with the ideological position and culture, the analysis will definitely enable us to be better-informed about the expression of evaluative meaning in the English language and thus contributes to the understanding of the underlying meaning of media texts.This thesis consists of five chapters.