| Book review is employed by book reviewers to present personal views and attitudes on newly-published books and thus realize the aim of recommendation to readers. It includes abundant appraisal resources and gets increasing attention from researchers. In the researches of book review, academic book review has always been the hot spot among researchers at home and abroad, whereas researches on biographical book review are seldom conducted. The construction of writer-reader interaction, as an important form of discourse, has received less attention in this field either. Hence, the present study aims to analyze the construction of writer-reader interaction in biographical book reviews based on the Appraisal Theory.The present study gives explanation for book review, Appraisal, Attitude, Graduation, Engagement and some other related terms. And the theoretical framework of it integrates three metafunctions of Systemic Functional Grammar, discourse analysis under three dimensional patterns of Critical Discourse Analysis, Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia and Martin’s Appraisal Theory. Appraisal Theory, as the most important theory in this study, consists of three subsystems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation.This study mainly focuses on the following research questions:(1) From the perspective of Appraisal, what is the general frequency and distribution feature of the three Appraisal values of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation in biographical review discourse?2) What is the configuration of each subcategory of the three Appraisal values in the biographical book reviews?(3) How do the three values work together to construct interaction between the writer and putative readers indirectly? How do the three values help achieve its communicative goal of biographical book reviews?In order to solve the abovementioned research questions, the present study adopts15book reviews on biography randomly from the internet as the corpus, and develops qualitative and quantitative approaches by using the software System-Coder. After analyzing the collected data, it is found that575appraisal resources are used by these writers to construct the writer-reader interaction. Specifically, Attitude resources take up to49.9%, Engagement resources15.5%and Graduation resources34.6%. In the Attitude system, affect takes up to15.3%, judgment44.9%and appreciation39.7%; in the Engagement system, dialogic contraction takes up to78.7%, while dialogic expansion21.3%; in the Graduation system, force takes up to92.5%, focus7.5%.The present study arrives at the following conclusions:(1) Attitude resources and Graduation resources are more frequently used than that of Engagement resources.(2) In the Attitude system, writers apply appreciation and judgment much more than affect for the sake of promoting the readability objectively as soon as possible. In the Graduation system, force is employed more often than focus. While in the Engagement system, the usage of dialogic expansion is not so much as that of dialogic contraction.(3) Biographical book reviewers tend to use Attitude resources to reveal their views and recommend readers to achieve an agreement; When writers aim to enhance their authority, they incline to use dialogic contraction to eliminate other voices and attempt to align with the putative readers. Meanwhile, Graduation resources are used to sharpen or soften their individual position and thus to influence and persuade putative readers. |
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