An Appraisal Analysis Of Chinese And Western English Literary Reviews And Their Cultural Implicature

Within the framework of Appraisal theory, this paper aims touncover the differences of appraisal strategies between the Chinese andthe Western literary reviews. A certain number of literary reviews fromChina Today and Time were collected as two sets of research data for thispaper. Statistics elicited from a quantitative research of these data revealthat the Chinese and the Western reviewers differ with each other in threeaspects.First, the Chinese reviewers employ much less appraisal resourcesthan the Western reviewers, which can be reflected in each of the threeattitudinal sub-systems as well as the total. And the Chinese reviewers useeven less resources for both Affect and Judgement. Second, the Chineseand the Western reviewers also differ in their preference for the patterningof the three attitudinal sub-systems. For Affect, the Chinese reviewers encode no Attitude as Affect toward the authors of the novels underreview, but the Western reviewers contribute most of their affectualresources to the authors. Within the domain of Judgement, the Chinesereviewers focus overwhelmingly on the professional capacities of theauthors while the Western reviewers tend to make an overall Judgement.As for Appreciation, the Chinese reviewers exhibit a remarkably strongpreference for Valuation while the Western reviewers almost make anequal use of the three subtypes of Appreciation. At last, a further analysisof the modes of Appraisal reveals that the Chinese reviewers stronglyprefer the use of Evoked Appraisal in encoding their attitude while theirWestern counterparts are more willing to directly express their attitudetoward the reviewed. These variations all point towards one fact that theChinese reviewers prefer an impersonal and indirect way of encodingattitude with attempts to avoid confrontation and maintain relationalharmony; while the Western reviewers exhibit no such intention andprefer the other way around in composing the same kind of genre.At last, culturally orientated implicature is also explored to makesense of these disparities.