A Research On The Attitude Resources In Andersen’s Fairy Tales From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Appraisal Theory put forward by James R. Martin is the extensive development of the interpersonal function within the Systematic Functional Grammar. As one of the three subsystems of Appraisal Theory, Attitude System is the core. Andersen’s Fairy Tales as one of the classic children’s books has received wide attention. Many scholars have made investigations into Andersen’s Fairy Tales from different perspectives. However, few of them study it from the perspective of Appraisal Theory. In view of this, the thesis conducts an investigation into Andersen’s Fairy Tales from the perspective of Attitude within the framework of Appraisal Theory aiming at finding out the distribution and features of attitude resources and how attitude resources realize the interpersonal meanings.As for the corpus of this research, five classic Andersen’s fairy tales in its English version are selected. The analysis upon the five selected fairy tales is based on quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative method is adopted to analyze the distribution and frequency of attitude resources in the corpus. The UAM Corpus Tool is applied to calculate the frequency and present the results of the distribution of all attitude resources. The qualitative method is adopted to analyze the features and functions of the attitude resources in detail.After detailed analysis, the present thesis concludes that in the selected fairy tales, all the attitude resources are employed. In terms of distribution of attitude resources, the Appreciation resources are the most prominent among the three types of resources. The distribution of Affect and Judgment resources is balanced. The function of Appreciation resources is to convey the aesthetic value. With the employment of Affect resources, readers are drawn closer to characters in fairy tales. And Judgment resources are employed to convey proposals about behavior. Within Affect system, un/happiness set is preferred over other sets. This is because un/happiness emotions are the expressive resources people born with. Taking children’s cognition ability into consideration, the basic emotions are easier to be caught and understood. Within Judgment system, capacity and propriety sets are preferred. This reflects the educational function of Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Children are instilled with what is right and what is wrong. The positive behavior is approved and praised and negative behavior is condemned and even punished. Within Appreciation system, reaction set is much more preferred. This is inseparable from the magic nature of fairy tales. In terms of grammatical realizations, Affect resources are mainly realized by Process and Attribute while Judgment resources are mainly realized by Epithet and Clause. It is discovered that the typical grammatical realizations of Appreciation resources are Epithet and Attribute. The linguistic features of the three sets of attitude resources meet the cognition ability of children which can help realize the interpersonal meanings of attitude resources. In terms of the interpersonal positioning, the inscribed attitude is preferred over invoked attitude. Therefore, the authority of the writer and the ideal readers are constructed. The interpersonal meanings of Andersen’s Fairy Tales are realized by the strategic arrangement of the attitude resources. The present thesis proves that it is feasible to apply the Attitude System into the analysis of fairy tales. In the future, more researches are expected to be conducted upon fairy tales from different perspectives of Appraisal Theory.