Appraisal In English Research Article Abstracts

Research article abstract, a sub-genre of academic discourse, attracts the attention of researchers in recent years. A large amount of valuable studies have been conducted on this genre in terms of its language features, generic structure and interpersonal meaning. However, previous studies on the interpersonal meanings ignore the interpersonal functionality of evaluative lexis and the dynamic academic interaction between the writer and the reader. This paper aims to apply a more comprehensive theoretical framework—Appraisal theory to explore the attitudinal and interpersonal meanings in research article (RA) abstracts.Appraisal theory adopted in this paper is a system of semantic resources to explore, describe and explain the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal relationships. It is a complement to Halliday's grammar-based model by focusing on the semantics of evaluation for exploring interpersonal meaning. The three subsystems of Appraisal, Attitude, Graduation and Engagement, are explored in the present study. This paper aims to discover what kind of Attitude and Engagement are preferred in RA abstracts, how Graduation is manipulated to indirectly evoke Appreciation, and how these Appraisal resources are interwoven in the text to fulfill the communicative functions and to enact alignment and solidarity.Sixty research article abstracts from three core linguistic journals (Applied linguistics, TESOL Quarterly, ELT) are collected for the detailed discourse analysis in this paper. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are adopted to analyze the samples. With the help of Sys-Coder, a linguistic software for coding corpus, the general occurrence of all Appraisal values are reported, which shows that within the Attitude system (39.5% of all Appraisal values), explicit Appreciation (35.5% of all Attitude values) is preferred to explicit Affect (1.5%) and Judgement (2.5%) in RA abstracts. Graduation is also used in a larger proportion (17.9% of total Appraisal values) to implicitly evoke Attitude, in which Force (15.9% of all Graduation values) expressed by Quantification (13.4%) as Amount (9.4%) plays a major role. Moreover,...