A Contrastive Study Of Graduation Resources In English And Chinese Linguistic Book Reviews

As an important activity in academic field, book reviews deal with the reviewers’description and evaluation of a book based on its contents, style and merits. Apart from theobjective assessment of the book, book reviews also involve the interaction among thereviewer, the author and the potential readers. With evaluation as the defining feature, how toavoid excessive subjectivity and form a harmonious academic atmosphere is essential to therealization of interpersonal meaning in the book reviews.The Appraisal theory is the development of interpersonal meaning of SystemicFunctional Linguistics, consisting of three systems: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation.Attitude is concerned with emotional reactions, judgement of behaviors and aestheticevaluation of things. Engagement deals with souring attitudes and the play of voices aroundopinions in discourses. Graduation involves grading phenomena whereby feelings areamplified and categories blurred. Graduation is related to the whole system of the Appraisal,hence crossing the other two subsystems. It operates across two axes of scalability, i.e. Forceand Focus.On the basis of the Graduation system under the Appraisal theory, this thesis examines40English and Chinese linguistic book reviews (20in English and20in Chinese) from theprestigious journals in linguistics both in China and western countries, aiming at analyzing thedistributions and realizations of Graduation resources in both English and Chinese linguisticbook reviews and revealing their similarities and differences with the help of thesoftware--UAM Corpus Tool. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted in thisstudy.Based on the statistical data and data analysis, the research findings can be summarizedas follows:1) Abundant Graduation resources are employed in both ELBRs and CLBRs toup-scale or down-scale attitude. More specifically, Force resources significantly outnumberFocus resources in both ELBRs and CLBRs. Comparatively speaking, more Focus resourcesare identified in ELBRs than in CLBRs.2) As for the scaling of the Graduation resources,there are more up-scaling resources than down-scaling resources with Raise resources taking the largest percentage in both ELBRs and CLBRs. Yet more down-scaling (both lowering andsoftening) resources are found in ELBRs than in CLBRs, which means that English reviewerstend to construe the value as more tentative and Chinese reviewers have the tendency ofexpressing a higher degree of certainty and commitment of the value.3) Within thesub-system of Force, there are less Intensification resources than Quantification ones in bothELBRs and CLBRs. Among the resources of Intensification, in ELBRs, the sub-category ofIntensity of Attribute far outnumbers the other two sub-categories: Vigour of Process andModulation of Proposal. Yet CLBRs employs more resources of Vigour of Process than theother two sub-categories. Both ELBRs and CLBRs intensify the least Force resources asModulation of Proposals.4) As for the sub-category of Quantification, the results show thatQuantification serves as the main Force resources in both ELBRs and CLBRs. And thepercentage of Quantification as Amount is much higher than that of Quantification as Processin both ELBRs and CLBRs. As for the sub-category of Quantification as Process, Extentresources significantly outnumber Frequency ones in both ELBRs and CLBRs. However, thepercentage of Extent in ELBRs is higher than that in CLBRs.5) In terms of the sub-categoryof Focus, more Valeur resources are employed in both ELBRs and CLBRs than Fulfilmentones. Both ELBRs and CLBRs employ more Specificity resources than Authenticity ones asValeur. However, more resources of Focus as Specificity are identified in CLBRs than inELBRs.6) As for the sub-category of Focus as Fulfilment, the results suggest that bothELBRs and CLBRs employ more Actualization resources than Completion ones.The contrastive analysis of Graduation resources in both ELBRs and CLBRs in thisstudy contributes a lot to the better understanding of the interpersonal meaning and has shedlight on the feasibility of Graduation system, which is rooted in English socio-culturalcontexts, especially for Chinese discourse analysis, which could provide insights intocontrastive discourse analyses between English and Chinese. Furthermore, this study mayhave pedagogical implication on both writing and teaching academic book reviews, helpingstudents gain more sensitivity and skills of Graduation resources to achieve the goal ofacademic communication.