An Appraisal Study Of English Newspaper Movie Reviews

In daily life, language can not only be used to deliver information, represent theworld but can also delineate feelings, attitudes or positions. Therefore, evaluation hasbecome more and more common and important in communication. Many scholars havebeen exploring evaluation from various perspectives and by various means. Amongthese explorations, the Appraisal Theory presented by Martin and White in the1990shas been developed under the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics and hasbeen widely employed in the analysis of different kinds of genres. The AppraisalTheory includes three subsystems: attitude, engagement and graduation. These threesubsystems consist of different subcategories respectively.This thesis is based on the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics andAppraisal Theory. Selecting20movie reviews from four major English broadsheetnewspapers (the Guardian, the Mirror, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post),which are annotated according to the appraisal resources they belong to, this study setsup a small corpus for in-depth investigation. The first goal is to research theproportions of each appraisal resources and how to cooperate in English newspapermovie reviews; the second is to figure out the reasons for these distributions; and thelast is to reveal the features of newspaper movie reviews.It can be found in this thesis: firstly, the resources of the three subsystems areabundant in newspaper movie reviews. Through analyzing the proportions of the threesubsystems, it can be noticed that these proportions are mainly determined by thesocial context and communicative goals.For attitude system, the proportion of affect is the lowest, as the reviewer tries toleave an objective impression for the readers. The affective resources mostly refer tothe emotions of the characters of the movie and make up a small proportion ofemotions of the reviewer; the proportion of appreciated resources takes up the largestpart in movie reviews and the things to be appreciated cover a wide range; theproportion of judgment resources is in between with the characters in the movie mostoften judged and the directors and actors sometimes judged.For engagement, the locutions of disclaim are more often used in movie reviews, for the reviewer more often applies negative words and concession words in his moviereview. Meanwhile, the locutions of entertain also takes up a certain proportion, inwhich way it makes space for alternative positions in order to establish a harmoniousrelationship with readers.For graduation, the resources of force are far more than those of focus, for thereason that the intensification and quantification of force are mostly employed tomodify attitude resources, with engagement resources modified in a small number.Secondly, the thesis concludes the features of the newspaper movie reviews.English newspaper movie review is a kind of subjective and dialogistic contractivediscourse. In movie reviews, the judgment of directors and actors are mainly evaluatedfrom the perspective of capacity, and that of characters in the movie from theperspective of propriety.The significance of this thesis is as follows:Firstly, the analysis of English newspaper movie review based on AppraisalTheory has enriched the systemic functional linguistic study on mess media discourses.Movie review, as an important part of English newspaper, contains the reviewer’sviewpoints on the new-released movies, which includes numerous appraisal resources.It provides abundant information for the readers to judge the value of the movie.Secondly, the frequencies and proportions of the three subsystems withinappraisal system have been calculated with the help of corpus software (AntConc3.4.3), and the features of the subsystems of appraisal system and the generic feature inEnglish newspaper movie reviews are also analyzed, which can generate a betterunderstanding on Appraisal Theory in English newspaper movie review.