A Contrastive Analysis Of Attitudinal Resources In English And Chinese Film Reviews Of The Flowers Of War In Light Of Appraisal Theory

The movie The Flowers of War was edited by the famous director Zhang Yimou in2011,having achieved great influence both at home and abroad. Despite that many film fans holddifferent opinions towards it, it is regarded as a banned film in Japan. In a word, this moviewas paid widely attention and highly praised domestically and internationlly by many famousscholars and fans. J.R.Martin and Peter White established Appraisal Theory in the1990s, inwhich many scholars use for analyzing various kinds of discourses, thus making it developfurther. The evaluation resources are divided into three sub-systems, being Attitude,Engagement and Graduation, while Attitude is the focus of the whole framework, it has threesub-categories: affect, judgement and appreciation.By selecting40film reviews from both English and Chinese famous newspapers andmagazines, under the framework of Appraisal Theory, the author adopts a contrastive analysisto study appraisal resources of both English and Chinese film reviews of The Flowers of War,especially their attitudinal resources. The method of quantitative and qualitative are used andthe reasons for such distribution will be given.The thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter one covers the introduction of thebackground, the objective, the purpose, the significance and the research questions. Chaptertwo consists of the overview of the film review and Appraisal Theory. As for film review, itsdefinition, function and previous study from home and abroad are expounded. As forAppraisal Theory, the author reviews the previous studies by many scholars from differentnationalities. Chapter three deals with the framework of Appraisal Theory. Chapter fourfocuses mainly on the methodology and data collection. Chapter five is the main body of thethesis, the author utilizes a method of contrastive analysis studying in detail the attitudinalresources in both English and Chinese film reviews of The Flowers of War. Chapter six is theconclusion.The author has come up with the following results: the Attitude resources take thedominant part of the whole Appraisal resources in both English and Chinese film reviews ofThe Flowers of War.The affect resources account for the smallest proportion, judgement andappreciation resources are shown to be the dominant Attitudes among40film reviews. As foraffect, the sub-category, dis/satisfaction takes the most important part among the foursub-categories. As for judgement, in English film reviews of The Flowers of War, the capacitytakes the majority amount of the whole judgement resources, followed by normality. But in Chinese film reviews, the capacity also takes the most important part of whole Judgementresources, followed by tenacity judgement resources. As for appreciation, reaction takes upthe largest percent in both English and Chinese film reviews of The Flowers of War. Thecomposition resources take the least proportion of the Appreciation resources. In those40filmreviews, the number of explicit appreciation and judgement is more than that of implicitappreciation and judgement.The author has also found out that English film reviews as a special kind of discourse, ithas two characteristics. For one, English film reviews is a bit subjective. The other feature isthat the film directors and actors are often judged from the perspective of capacity, and thecharacteristics in the movie are often appreciated in the view of propriety.