Anappraisalanalysis Of Theattitudinal Meanings In English Academic Book Review

With the continual renovation of knowledge and the rapid development of academic research, more and more academic books flow into the book market. Then, how to judge the value of a book and how to make a wise decision in choosing books become urgent tasks for all the potential readers. Thus, academic book review, serving as a tool to introduce and evaluate a book or a series of books sharing a single subject or related subjects, draws people's much more attention. As it is well known, the very core of academic book review is to present the valuable points of the book, and affirm its contribution to human knowledge and academic progress. And at the same time, academic book reviewer should also be responsible for uncovering the shortcomings and failures of the book under review, so as to explore the directions and ways for improvement and development. Besides, academic book review can not only help readers keep up with the latest information, but also aid them to make a wise decision in choosing books. Then, what is the generic feature of academic book review? How do the reviewers express their attitudes and make evaluations on the books under review? Based on Martin's Appraisal Theory, the present study chooses academic book review as the research object and aims at exploring the distribution and realization of the attitudinal meanings in English academic book review (hereafter EABR).The theoretical framework of this study is Martin's Appraisal Theory, which is a newly-developed lexico-grammatical framework for studying interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics. It is employed to analyze the interpersonal function at the discourse semantic level and is concerned with varieties of attitudes negotiable in a text. More specifically, this theory explores how people express their attitude, judgment and appreciation, and how to realize potential interaction and empathy with others. The Appraisal Theory consists of three sub-systems, namely, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. With the focus on Attitude system, 30 English academic book reviews selected from two leading journals—Applied Linguistics and Journals of English Linguistics and one Internet website http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews are collected for the research data. They are systematically analyzed and discussed with the hope of finding out how the attitudinal meanings are distributed and realized in EABR.Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are adopted in this study. On the one hand, with the aid of UAM CorpusTool 2.0 to annotate the attitudinal resources in these 30 EABRs, quantitative method is employed to make a statistical analysis of the distributions of different attitudinal meanings. On the other hand, qualitative research is carried out to provide relevant and reasonable explanations and logical arguments.The research has yielded some significant findings as follows: First, EABRs are found to contain a large amount of attitudinal resources. In this corpus, attitudinal resources occur 1018 times. Meanwhile, the distributions and frequencies of all sub-systems of Attitude are not well-proportioned. The proportion of Appreciation (83.60%) outnumbers those of Affect (4.13%) and Judgment (12.28%). Second, most of the attitudinal meanings towards books under review are realized by Appreciation. Among the subcategories of Appreciation, Valuation with more occurrence (384 occurrences) and higher percentage (45.13%) is given additional load than Reaction and Composition. As for the realization of Appreciation, the canonical grammatical realization is adjectival. The word comprehensive is found to be the most frequently used adjectival Appreciation. Third, Judgment as a human-oriented category is not prevalent in EABRs, which only occurs 125 times. Under this system, the weight of social esteem is bigger than that of social sanction. Adverb is the most used lexical item to realize the meaning of Judgment. Fourth, affectual meaning in these 30 EABRs takes the least proportion, and it is mainly realized by verbs of emotion. Finally, it's found out that positive Attitude (740 occurrences) in the corpus appears more frequently than negative Attitude (278 occurrences).The significance of this study is evident. On the one hand, studying attitudinal meanings in EABR can enrich the application of Appraisal Theory, and lay a good foundation for its further study and development. On the other hand, it can stimulate our understanding and perception of EABR, and help us learn to better express our attitude, judgment and appreciation. Thus, the present study may shed certain light on the cultivation of genre awareness and English writing as well.