A Corpus-based Analysis Of American Human Rights Reports On China From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Appraisal Theory is proposed by J. R. Martin as a new development of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. Theoretically, it is taken as a reliable approach to analyze interpersonal meaning and a breakthrough to the previous limitations of interpersonal meaning analysis. In practice, it is applied by numerous linguists to research into various types of discourses. Appraisal Theory reveals how interpersonal function is realized with evaluative resources.Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (Human Rights Reports) are annually released by America to comment on the human rights situations in various countries. This study tries to analyze the appraisal resources in Human Rights Reports on China from the perspective of Appraisal Theory.The 15 American Human Rights Reports on China from 1999 to 2013 are collected and Summary parts are particularly chosen to build a corpus because they contain most appraisal resources in the reports as well as due to space limits of the thesis. The word number in the corpus is 10936. The self-compiled corpus is analyzed with the help of UAM Corpus Tool, which aims to tag text corpora under annotation system established by the users themselves. With the appraisal resources annotated according to the annotation system, relevant distribution statistics will be generated automatically, which is definitely convenient for further discussions. Together with distributions statistics, affiliated functions of UAM Corpus Tool such as description of per file in the corpus are also employed. In the process of research, the appraisal features will gradually show themselves. The study is conducted in a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.In the study, the following questions are expected to be discussed:1. How are the appraisal resources distributed in the reports as a whole?2. What are the features of the three subsystems of appraisal resources? (1) What are the features of Attitude resources? (2) What are the features of Engagement resources? (3) What are the features of Graduation resources?Major findings of this study are as follows:Firstly, in the appraisal resources, the number of Attitude resources ranks the first, that of Engagement resources ranks the second while that of Graduation resources ranks last. It is found that the distribution features of the corpus are also applicable in each Summary of the corpus.Secondly, the features of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation resources are also presented and discussed in the study. In Attitude resource, affect resources seldom appears while appreciation resources occupy the highest proportion. Affect is avoided in order to decrease subjectivity. Judgment and Appreciation are applied much more than Affect, but mostly in an invoked way, which would convey a meaning that the evaluations do not come directly from the evaluator himself. In appreciation resources, self-valuations occupy the highest proportion because social standards are chosen as the evaluating measurements in order to get support from mass and enhance objectivity. The polarity and explicitness of Attitude are also annotated in this study and it is easily found that negative attitude is prevalent, but the over negativity is questionable itself. And the negative attitude is mostly realized with invoked judgment and appreciation resources. In Engagement resources, no monoglossic engagement exists in the corpus and the heteroglossic engagement resources are mainly divided into four types according to different source of voice. Each type is applied for particular purposes. With the. analysis of Graduation resources, the negative tone is found to set at the departure points of per file in the corpus and upscale force together with sharpening focus are mostly applied for emphasis and intensification of negative evaluation.Appraisal Theory could be used and effectively applied in the research of American Human Rights Reports and in other government evaluative reports. As Human Rights Reports are also a kind of political discourse, the political implications should be interpreted during reading. With this study, it is expected that a rational and reasonable way of comprehension could be delivered to the addressees of Human Rights Reports to some degree.