| With the flourishing development of mass media, the industry of movie is nowencountering a brand-new time. Meanwhile, as a special category of evaluation discourse whichis closely related with movie, movie review is worthy of further study and appealing more andmore attention. On the one hand, it provides a convenient approach for the audience to expresstheir feelings and attitudes towards the movie. On the other hand, under the guidance of others’movie reviews, the potential audience can decide whether the movie worth watching or not, aswell as learn how to understand and appreciate the movie. Besides, movie review usually aimsto analyze and evaluate the aesthetic value and social significance of the movie, so it is also ofgreat significance for the directors to broaden their horizon and improve their works. All ofthese factors make movie review valuable for the development and prosperity of the art ofmovie. However, the fact is that the current quality of the movie reviews is not always favorable.Hence, it is of great significance and necessity to study how to write movie review properly andhow to obtain useful information from other’s movie reviews.As indicated, movie review is a special category of evaluation discourse based on theutilization of appraisal resources. Evaluation is one of the basic functions of language, and therehave been many relative theories conducted by linguists to explain it. Among those theories,Appraisal Theory, which is put forward by J.R. Martin and his colleagues, has achieved widerecognition. According to Martin, there are three sub-systems of Appraisal Theory that areAttitude, Engagement and Graduation with Attitude as the core. Appraisal Theory has beenstudied in various fields since its foundation, and all of these studies have defined and perceivedAppraisal Theory from different perspectives and achieved a lot of findings. However, sinceAppraisal Theory is still a relatively new branch, there are still some limitations and unsolvedproblems calling for further study, such as the lack of specific criteria for classification anduniform terminology. Moreover, only a small number of researches have been done on moviereviews under the framework of Appraisal Theory, so there is still room for researchers toexplore.Briefly speaking, movie reviewers tend to adopt a lot of appraisal resources especially attitudinal resources in their movie reviews, and it is of great value to study the appraisalresources in movie reviews under the framework of Appraisal Theory. Therefore,this thesisaims to analyze the attitudinal resource in movie reviews based on a corpus of26moviereviews of Forrest Gump.During the procedure of data collection and data analysis, this thesis adopts bothquantitative methods and qualitative methos to make the study as valid and objective aspossible. All those selected movie reviews are from famous website, such ashttp://www.mrqe.com/.With quantitative method, the study will obtain relevant statistics aboutthe distribution of different kinds of attitudinal resources. Then the study will analyze thecollected statistics with qualitative method. With the combination of these two kinds of analysismethods, this study will provide a relatively comprehensive modal of utilizing and appreciatingthe attitudinal resources in movie reviews.This thesis aims to answer the following questions: How do the three kinds of Attitudedistribute in movie reviews? How do movie reviewers evaluate the characters, staff, plot andscene with different kinds of attitudinal resources? Besides, how do attitudinal resourcesachieve personal functions? The major objective of this thesis is to establish a relativelycomprehensive model of utilizing and appreciating attitudinal resources in movie reviews.To make the study more logical and reasonable, the author first makes a brief introductionto the study of Appraisal Theory both at home and abroad in Chapter Two, and also introducesthe relative study of movie reviews under the framework of Appraisal Theory. Chapter Threeserves as the basis for the detailed analysis in Chapter Five which introduces Appraisal Theoryand its three sub-systems, namely, Attitude, Gradation and Engagement. As this thesis is tostudy the attitudinal resources in movie reviews, the author presents a particular introduction ofAttitude and its sub-systems, Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. Chapter Four introduces theanalysis procedure, the decoding methods as well as the corpus of this thesis. Then, the authorputs forward a detailed analysis of the attitudinal resources in the selected movie reviews fromthe following aspects: the overall evaluation, the evaluation of the plot and scene, the evaluationof the characters and of the staff. At last, the author concludes the major findings of the studyand also points out the limitations.After a relatively comprehensive analysis, the author draw the following conclusions. First, movie reviewers mainly evaluate the movie from the following aspects, the characters, the staff,and the plot and scene, and they also presents some overall evaluation in movie reviews.Second, to evaluate different aspects of the movie, movie reviewers choose different kinds ofattitudinal resources. In the overall evaluation as well as the evaluation of the plot and scene,reviewers utilize more Affect and Appreciation, but when it comes to the evaluation of thecharacters and staff, Judgment is most frequently used. Moreover, the distribution of attitudinalresources shows a great difference. Appreciation overwhelms all the other attitudinal resourcesand is mostly adopted in the overall evaluation and the evaluation of the plot. The percentage ofAffect is the least as it is loaded with subjectivity, and they are mostly adopted in overallevaluation. Judgment resources are mostly used to evaluate human and human behavior, so theyare mostly utilized to evaluate the characters and staff. Finally, the author finds out the differentways for the attitudinal resources to achieve the interpersonal functions.Although this thesis selects26movie reviews, the corpus is still not large enough. Thestatistics mentioned in the thesis can not be absolutely exact. But the results can still refletswhat this thesis wants to verify, and there is still a space for further improvement. |
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