Discourse Analysis Of The Analects From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Confucius is a great thinker and educationist, ranked as the first place of the world ten outstanding thinkers. His profound thoughts have far-reaching influence on the Chinese traditional culture and are taken as the spiritual treasure for the human being. The Analects is the carrier and main embodiment of the Confucius' thoughts. Nan Huaijin, a famous Sinologist, once said, "In any places and times, Confucius' doctrine and the value of The Analects have indestructible and imperishable value all the time if his original meaning is not misinterpreted on purpose." Ever since the compilation of The Analects two thousand years ago, numerous scholars have studied it deeply from the perspective of annotation, politics, philosophy, education, translation and so on, and they have obtained great achievements. Language is a tool of exchanging thoughts for human beings and text is the organic carrier of the thoughts. So far, there have been few studies on The Analects from the perspective of discourse analysis.The Appraisal theory, a newly-developed lexico-grammatical framework for studying interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics is concerned with varieties of attitudes negotiable in a text. It is a breakthrough for studying interpersonal meaning and provides us with a new theoretical framework to interpret interpersonal meaning in the discourse. The Analects is full of attitudes and appraisals that Confucius and his disciples offer toward doctrine of benevolence, learning and teaching, politics and so on. Thus, the Appraisal theory, a newly-developed interpersonal functional theory, presents us an proper framework to interpret the interpersonal meaning in The Analects. The Analects, which the Appraisal theory has not been applied to, becomes a new type of material to check its interpretive power.The present study takes samples by numbers of odd and even. Altogether 10 odd-numbered pieces are chosen from The Analects. We tag the corpus by AnnoTool—an easy-to-use annotating tool and then use concordance tool of AntConc to do the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the distribution features of appraisal resources. Based on our analysis, it is founded that positive attitudes are predominant and play an important role in abridging the interpersonal gap among Confucius and his disciples and the putative readers. With a large amount of attitudinal resources, especially Judgement, The Analects construes a positive and upright ideology and thereby establishes community of shared positive social values. In order to align more readers to this positive community, The Analects appeals to the Engagement resources and Graduation resources. Located under the heteroglossic backdrop, The Analects employs more resources of dialogistic contraction and suppress or fend off alternative positions, so as to make its position more warrantable and persuasive. Meanwhile, resources of dialogistic expansion are employed to admit the existence of other positions, to take an open stance, and to invite more readers to join the negotiation, and thereby persuade them to align with Confucius and his disciples' position. Under Graduation, the resources of force-raising and focus-sharpening effectively amplify Confucius and his disciples' voice, and make their position clearer and at a strong momentum. Thereby with high persuasiveness, more readers will be aligned.The present study tries to explore the appraisal meaning in The Analects within the framework of the Appraisal theory, which provides a new theoretical perspective to interpret The Analects and promotes the development of research on The Analects in the field of foreign language studies. Meanwhile it further validates the practicability and interpretive power of the Appraisal theory, enlarges its range of applications and provides some useful implications for its applications in the ancient Chinese.