A Study Of Microblog Discourse From Perspective Of Attitude System In Appraisal Theory

Microblog is considered as one of the most important media with more and more users from various domains. Microblog is another form of blog, which is strictly confined within140Chinese characters. This thesis aims to find out how Appraisal Theory can guide the analysis concerning microblog discourse features and its social significance.The thesis takes the cyber language on Sina Microblog as its research target and corpus. The analyses of the data indicate that among the three Attitudes, Attitudinal meaning of Appreciation (67.9%) is obviously and largely foregrounded rather than Affect (21.2%) and Judgment (10.9%).Within the sub-categories of Appreciation, Valuation (37.2%) has more frequencies than Reaction (13.4%) and Composition (11.5%). Within the subcategories of Judgment, Normality (4.5%) is the type used most frequently. Within Affect resource, Satisfaction (9.0%) values appears more frequently than the other two Affect values-Happy (6.4%) and Security (5.8%). These figures indicate that in microblog discourse, microblog users are more likely to express their Appreciation attitude than showing Affect or making Judgment. The Appreciation is the main Attitude pattern of expression.The thesis is composed of five chapters:Chapter One is an introduction to the entire thesis and it presents research background, significance of the research as well as the organization of the thesis. Chapter Two gives a brief introduction to microblog and generalizes the studies of microblog language from different angles of research. Chapter Three is the theoretical framework which is the theoretical guidance of Appraisal Theory. The three sub-systems-Attitude, Engagement and Graduation are introduced. What is more, the three sub-categories of Attitude-Affect, Judgment and Appreciation are elaborately represented. Chapter Four is the main body of the whole thesis, which is essentially made up of the research design and data analysis of150sample microblogs. And finally it comes to the conclusion in Chapter Five which concludes the major findings and limitations of the research as well as the prospects for future studies in this field.