The Analysis Of Attitudinal Resources In Andersen’s Fairy Tales Based On The Appraisal Theory

Appraisal Theory extents the Systemic Functional Linguistics account of the interpersonal function. It has been employed in various discourse domains, but seldom in the field of fairy tales.Andersen’s fairy tales as the representative in the field of fairy tales doubtlessly become the first choice of the study. This thesis aims to analyze the attitudinal resources in Andersen’s fairy tales tentatively, finding out the features of fairy tales as far as attitude is concerned.The corpus consists of ten popular Andersen’s fairy tales, which are chosen from the English version translated by Tiina Nunnally. The thesis will analyze the three kinds of attitudinal resources: affect, judgement and appreciation by data-collecting and statistics analysis, which is built on data-driven qualitative methods.Several major findings of the study are summed up as follows:(1) Fairy tale is abundant in attitude resources; the appreciation occupies the most, then is the affect and the last one is the judgement. As to the three sub-types of attitude system, the emotion about un/happiness plays an important role in affect resources; the evaluation about capacity of the judgement resources is in the majority; in appreciation, the most prominent one is the evaluation in reaction.(2) The percentage of evoked evaluations of appreciation is relatively the highest. Because in fairy tales the writer would like to create a magical and wonderful world which the children usually do not experience before. Using inscribed descriptions facilitates children’s integration into fairy tales.(3) As to the study of lexico-grammatical realisation of attitude resources, in the category of affect, the collected data shows Process and Clause are the two main realisation forms; and as to the matter of judgement, Epithet and Attribute are the main ways in realisation; Epithet is prominent in realisation of appreciation resources.(4) As to the interpersonal position, the majority of the attitude resources are inscribed meanings, which means the writer does treat children as the compliant readers/listeners and use the constructive resources to convey his ideology to children. In term of appreciation, most of the resources come from the backgrounded narrator. And the judgement ones are usually expressed by characters. And the affect resources are construed by the voice of omniscient narrator revealing the characters’ emotion.The present study proves and testifies the applicability of Appraisal Theory in the field of fairy tales; also it is carried out in a fresh way—linguistic way, in order to explore the features of Andersen’s fairy tales from the aspect of attitude; the present study gives some suggestive hints for the writing of fairy tales.