Interpersonal And Attitudinal Meanings Of The Scientific Report Text

Scientific reports are a very important kind of practical writing in English for science and technology (EST). Many applied linguists are interested in the way in which scientific and technical ideas are expressed in English. From their discussion, one can see that one obvious feature of EST is that it is usually considered the impersonal and objective type in common sense. Nevertheless, according to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), one knows that any language expresses interpersonal meaning and conveys attitude. Then, how to understand the scientific report text? Is it still interpersonal and conveying attitudinal meaning? This thesis is going to answer this question. Thus the interpersonal and attitudinal meanings of scientific reports will be examined.Undoubtedly, this examination is about the functions of language, and it will be done mainly from perspectives of SFL and its newly development— Appraisal Theory. Specifically, to analyze functions of language, people usually analyze the language user (the speaker and the listener or the writer and the reader, for example), analyze the context in which language is used, and analyze language itself. These three perspectives constitute the cornerstones of the examination of this thesis. Thus, through a general theoretical analysis of the three aspects and a further specific analysis of these three aspects of scientific reports (including using Appraisal Theory as the theoretical tool to do Appraisal analysis and using Coder as the tool to do statistical analysis), this thesis comes to this conclusion:The text of a scientific report is also interpersonal and attitude-loaded, and it involves the negotiation between the writer and the reader. Almost all the categories of Appraisal resources, which convey the interpersonal and attitudinal meanings, can be involved in scientific reports. Among these resources, Appreciation, Modality and Force appear a lot. The following are the specific arrangements of the contents of this thesis.Chapter One is the literature review of scientific reports. There are some information about the writer and the reader and the context of scientific reports, but so far, there has been a scarcity of works that directly take the language of scientific reports as the target of research. The current thesis recognizes the interpersonal and attitudinal meanings of scientific reports, and will make a direct and more extensive study of these meanings from the aspects mentioned above (the writer and the reader, and the context) and from language itself.In Chapter Two, after discussing language interaction and its contributive factors (language user, context, and language), this thesis preliminarily comes to the realization that language itself is interactive in nature. The writer and the reader are actively interactive. Context makes language intelligible, for both the writer and the reader know or are assumed to know the context. And language itself, its Mood, Modality, and Dialogic view, always conveys interpersonal meaning, and the attitude of the language user occurs within this interrelationship. These three constitute the bearing points or cornerstones in doing language analysis in this thesis.Chapter Three is about Appraisal Theory, that is. the specific Appraisal resources of language. It is a further study of language functions. Appraisal Theory is a more detailed framework with more specific Appraisal resources for people to analyze interpersonal engagement and attitude. Here, this thesis further emphasizes that even the 'impersonal' text in common sense still creates an interpersonal relationship, and conveys an attitude.Based on all the discussions above, this thesis comes to its conclusion that the text of a scientific report is also interpersonal and attitude-loaded.In Chapter Four, scientific reports are examined from the perspectives of the writer and the reader, and context, and further expounded with Appraisal from the perspective of language itself. Those Appraisal resources are analyzed by statistical comparison and analysis. At last, case study is conducted to test the conclusion and also to show an example of full-text Appraisal and statistical analyses of an individual report. All this makes the conclusion of the thesis tenable.Finally, this thesis comes to its final conclusion mentioned above. It alsomentions some points that need further improvements. For example, larger-scale sample investigations, that is, more samples and more comprehensive statistical analysis may be conducted in this thesis. Anyhow, the conclusion offers another angle to examine scientific reports, and in particular it is a new attempt to inquire into scientific reports with Appraisal Theory. It should be enlightening to some extent. It reminds people not simply to accept some thing as commonsense "fact" or as authority. On the contrary, people should be active and creative to reflect what the writer has said., and be courageous enough to ask a question, and even to challenge the writer's opinion. Thus people can make further researches and further progress.