A Contrastive Analysis Of Attitudinal Resources In English And Chinese Movie Trailers’ Discourses

In the recent decades, film, which is considered as a prominent part of entertainmentindustry, has risen speedily and developed prosperously. It not only brings about great profitsto various film-making corporations and benefits relevant commodity production but alsocreates a feast for eyes of global audience from esthetic perspective and casts enlightenmentto their life. Undoubtedly, the glorious success of film industry depends mainly on theadvertising effect of movie trailer. As a new genre, it deploys a large quantity of emotionalterms to assess the film itself and interacts with the prospective audience and provides themwith persuasive guidance by constructing psychological solidarity from a linguisticperspective indirectly.Therefore in order to uncover the mechanisms by which English and Chinese movietrailers function on the potential consumers and reveal the ideologies that are reflected by dintof certain attitudinal resources, this thesis attempts to make a contrastive analyses of theattitudinal distribution and realization means in both.In detail, UAM Corpus Tool is applied to annotate50texts of English movie trailers and50Chinese ones. On the basis of the theoretical framework of Halliday’s systematic-functional grammar and the scheme of appraisal system proposed by Martin, severaldisparities and similarities of attitudinal distribution and realization means in English andChinese movie trailers are found.Firstly both of them have the tendency of attitudinal distribution which is like"judgement> appreciation> affect”. Secondly, both English and Chinese movie trailers areinclined to deploy the positive attitude. Nevertheless, in Chinese movie trailers, positivenessand negativeness change more sharply especially in the subsystems of judgement andappreciation than those of English movie trailers.Thirdly in terms of positional distributionfeatures of affect system, the relationship is"C>V>S v.s. V>C>S", in judgement system, it is"V>S>C v.s. C>V>S" while in appreciation system, the relationship is "S>V>C v.s. V>C>S".Last but not least with respect to the realization means, in English movie trailers, verbsfunction best in affect and judgement systems while adjectives perform best in appreciationsystem. Compared to that, in Chinese movie trailers, verbs work better in affect andjudgement systems while nouns are key means in appreciation system.To conclude, this study, for one thing, has scientifically testified the feasibility ofappraisal system’s application to the genre of movie trailers, i.e., broaden the applicationscope. It is believed that, for another, persistent efforts to make further comparative analyseswill have a beneficial impact on the audience’s consuming activities from economic aspect,citizens’ institutional values from social angle and art enthusiasts’ appreciating behaviors fromesthetic perspective.