| Appraisal theory is initially developed by James Martin in the early 1990 s on the basis of Halliday’s interpersonal function within the Systemic Functional Linguistic(SFL). It contains three subsystems: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. The theory aims at exploring interpersonal meaning of written or oral text from the perspective of discourse semantics. It is suitable for evaluating the author or speaker’s attitude from the angle of lexical choices. In other words, the author’s attitudes are mainly revealed by his or her lexical resources which can be investigated within the framework of Appraisal theory. Attitude System is concerned with the feelings of the appraiser on people and things, including emotional reactions, judgements of behavior and evaluation of things. It is further divided into three subsystems: affect, judgement and appreciation.In recent years, Appraisal theory has been widely applied in discourse analysis, literary works is a newly emerging area of theory application. So Young is a renowned novel written by Xin Yiwu in 2007, it has been crazily pursued by the youngsters. Xin Yiwu is the most popular woman writer after 80 s, the new leader of youth literature. She is good at writing novels about female emotion, warm injuries youth is the distinguishing feature of her works and created by her originally. The novel mainly narrates a love story between the heroine Zheng Wei and the hero Chen Xiaozheng when they are in the university, graduate from college and enter the society.This thesis makes an attempt to investigate this novel within the theoretical framework of Attitude system. We expect to help readers better understand the disposition of the main character Zheng Wei and her metamorphosis through the emotional wound, thus further explore her growth and maturity. Based on Attitude subsystem, this thesis deals with the following two questions:(1) How does the author express Zheng Wei’s attitudes and feelings through discourses in each stage? How do different attitude resources work together to construct Zheng Wei’s character?(2) How do attitude resources in each stage reflect the change of Zheng Wei’s attitudes and feelings and thus reveal her growth and maturity?For carrying out our investigation, nine chapters have been selected as the corpus and we have divided our analysis into five stages: ⑴ Zheng Wei enters the university; ⑵ Zheng Wei meets Chen Xiaozheng and woos him; ⑶ Zheng Wei and Chen Xiaozheng are together; ⑷ Zheng Wei and Chen Xiaozheng break up; ⑸ Zheng Wei meets Chen Xiaozheng again. In analyzing the data, both quantitative and qualitative methodology are employed. For each stage, we collect the Attitude resources in discourses and relevant narrations of Zheng Wei, and then classify them into three sub-systems, affect, judgement and appreciation. The frequencies of the resources in each category are counted. Tables are made to show the distribution of attitude resources in each stage, including numbers and percentages of attitude resources in each subcategory.Through investigation, major findings can be summarized as follows: at first, the heroine Zheng Wei is a lovely and cheerful, courageous, persistent, sensitive and wayward girl. After being abandoned and hurt by Chen Xiaozheng, she becomes maturer than before. Although she stays unchanged in nature, enthusiastic, sincere and kindhearted, she is steadier than before. She becomes appropriate in dressing and behaviors. She no longer speaks out whatever in her mind. She has learned to disguise her real feelings. Even facing with tremendous pain, she does not appear hysterical. She is less impetuous and willful. She has learned to control her emotions.It is a band-new try to apply Appraisal theory in the analysis of the novel So Young. The present research has proved that it is feasible to apply Appraisal theory to analyze Chinese novels and it provides us with a distinctive perspective to understand the personality of characters and linguistic features of the novel. |
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