A Contrastive Study Of Appraisal System In English And Chinese Linguistic Book Reviews

Appraisal theory(AT) is a recently new development of systemic functional linguistics(SFL),which was put forward by J.Martin and White in the late 1990s as the expansion of interpersonal function of SFL.AT is a new comprehensive framework for the study of interpersonal meaning,and it concerns all kinds of attitudes,which can be negotiated in discourses.Appraisal system is concerned with evaluation,the kinds of attitudes that are expressed in a text,the feeling presented,the values involved and readers aligned.Its origin can be traced back to a research project,referred to as "Write it Right", conducted in Australia in the 1990s.Since then,many researchers have explored the literary requirements of the discourse of science,technology,history,literature and media in the framework of appraisal system.However,the book review,which is a tool for academic exchange,has been ignored.This paper makes a contrastive analysis of the appraisal resources and strategies in English and Chinese linguistic book reviews by applying appraisal theory in the hope of uncovering differences in the choice of appraisal resources and strategies,and accounting for such differences by employing the taxonomy which consists of the politeness strategy, culture typology,academic tradition and Hofstede's value dimensions.The exploration of the four culture-specific factors that have influenced the choices of appraisal resources and appraisal strategies in English book reviews(EBRs) and Chinese book reviews(CBRs) gives us a better understanding of the contrastive analysis.The corpora for this research consist of 10 EBRs and CBRs respectively,which were published in three authorative linguistic journals:Applied Linguistics,Journal of Pragmatics,Phonology and Language Teaching Research from 2006 to 2008 and 10 CBRs,which were published in three Chinese authorative linguistic journals:Foreign Language Teaching and Research,Modern Foreign Languages,Contemporary Linguistics and Foreign Languages and Their Teaching during the period.All the book reviews relate to different branches of linguistics,such as pragmatics,semantics,phonology,syntax, functional grammar and second language acquisition.And the amount of each branch of EBRs and CBRs are equal.On the basis of data analyses,the study has drawn the following conclusions.(1) The frequency of the three sub-systems of appraisal system in EBRs is different from that in CBRs.In EBRs,the tendency of the frequency scaling from high to low is engagement,attitude and graduation successively,while in CBRs,the tendency can be shown as attitude,engagement and graduation in order.(2) As for the attitudinal resources,there are points of similarities and differences between EBRs and CBRs.Generally speaking,CBRs use much more attitude resources than EBRs.The frequency of appreciation is the highest and successively followed by judgment and affect,and the affect is the least used attitudinal resources in both EBRs and CBRs.In both EBRs and CBRs,negative attitudes take a certain proportion of the total resources for attitude,and more appraisal meanings are presented in the form of positive appreciations than negative ones.The difference lies in the fact that CBRs uses less explicit expressions to show negative attitude than that in EBRs.(3) In the two types of engagement,the employment of heterogtoss is much more frequent than that of monogloss in both EBRs and CBRs.Besides,in both EBRs and CBRs,the frequency of dialogic expansion is a little higher than that in dialogic contraction.Furthermore,disclaim seldom appear in both CBRs and EBRs.However,the frequencies of disclaim in CBRs are a litter lower than that in EBRs.However,modality,hedge,concession and various comment adverbials in CBRs enjoy a relatively high frequently of occurrence than that in EBRs so as to show Chinese caution and modesty.On the other hand,there are some differences in the usage of personal pronoun.Chinese do not use full name directly.The situation is opposite in EBRs.(4) As for the graduation,there are few differences between EBRs and CBRs.Both English reviewers and Chinese reviewers usually use some sharpen words to stand out positive attitude,and use some soften words to blur negative attitude.And it is clear that the frequency of soften in CBRs is much higher than that in EBRs.Chinese reviewers usually more soften words to blur negative attitude,and to decrease the forces of evaluation,so as to show uncertainty and modest.Besides,Chinese book reviews are more likely to use high value words to enrich expressions and make them more vivid.