Evaluation Function Of The English Negative Sentences In Three Stylistic Analysis

English negation has long drawn the attention of linguists; most of the description of negation is carried out on its syntactic, prosodic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. In fact, from the dialogistic perspective, negation is a resource for introducing the alternative positive position into the dialogue, and hence acknowledging it, then rejecting it, thus realizing the interpersonal function in written discourse. Yet, the study about negation as an important appraisal resource has received less attention for a long time.This thesis applies the Appraisal Theory into the stylistic analysis of English evaluative negative sentences in such three different styles as fiction, academic texts and news through a corpus-based approach to achieve these research objectives: (1) to investigate their frequencies and their distributional differences at the lexical level; (2) to describe their syntactic patterns; (3) to elaborate the causes for those differences.This corpus-based study shows that: first of all, among the overall frequency in the use of explicit evaluative negative sentences, fiction ranks the first, news the second and academic texts the last. Second, there are some differences in these explicit evaluative negative sentences functioning as attitude, engagement and graduation resources: more attitude resources in fiction than those in news and academic texts, more engagement resources in news and fiction than those in academic texts while no obvious differences in the graduation resources among these three styles. Third, there are also some differences in these evaluative negative sentences distributed in the sub-categories of three attitude systems: in three styles more judgment resources than affect and appreciation resources; while between the two sub-categories of judgment subtle differences exist in the ratio of social esteem to social sanction.Combining with stylistic theory, the thesis tries to offer a reasonable explanation about the causes for the differences at those levels.