An Analysis Of The Attitude Resources In The Commentary Of A Bite Of China From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

As a special type of TV programs, the documentary takes the real life as materials and the real persons and events as objects in order to pass the real information to the audience. With the development of the mass media technology, the documentary not only wins more and more focus and love of the audience, but also becomes an important mean to carry and promote the history, culture and social values. Therefore, the analysis of the documentary commentary plays a significant role in understanding the social functions of documentary. The previous studies on the documentary commentary mainly focus on the perspective of translation and communication and the studies on the interpersonal meaning are limited.This thesis attempts to explore the attitude resources in the commentary of A Bite of China from the perspective of appraisal Theory. Appraisal Theory, as an approach to extend Halliday’s SFL account of the interpersonal function, was proposed by J.R.Martin in the 1990s. It is concerned with how the writers/speakers express their opinions, stance and attitudes towards people or things by the language mechanism. The appraisal system consists of three sub-categories: attitude system, engagement system and graduation system. Attitude system is concerned with people’s feelings, including emotional reaction, judgement of behaviour and evaluation of things. It comprises affect system, judgement system and appreciation system. This study takes the seven texts drawn from the commentaries of the first season of A Bite of China as research corpus, aiming to investigate the distributive features, realization types and interpersonal meanings of the attitude resources by way of annotation, statistics and analysis. After a quantitative and qualitative analysis, the following findings are drawn:Firstly, the author expresses the appraiser’s attitude towards food, people, life and nature and realizes the writer-audience interactions by the construction of different appraisal resources. By attitude resources, the author depicts the complicated emotions of people to the food such as happiness, satisfaction and insecurity. By judgement, the author presents the noble characters of Chinese such as intelligent, capable, skilful, hardworking, persistent, honest, generous, responsible and so on, which shows the author’s appreciation of Chinese people. With appreciation, the author presents the characters of Chinese food and sketches a kind of close and harmonious relationships between people, things, life and nature. Besides, the writer tactfully aligns the audience into the Chinese cuisine culture he constructs by the employment of different attitude resources. Thus the interpersonal function of this documentary is featured.Secondly, there are rich attitude resources in the documentary with 1941 language items annotated. In terms of the distributive feature of the attitude resources, the proportion of appreciation ranks top, much higher than that of judgement and affect. This feature highlights the objectivity of the documentary. As far as the appreciation is concerned, the proportion of reaction resources is the highest, followed by valuation resources. This feature conforms to the theme and purpose of the documentary. This documentary writer aims to increase the interests of the audience to Chinese cuisine culture by the evaluation on the characters, impact and value of Chinese food. Within judgement, the resources of social-esteem overwhelmingly outweigh those of social-sanction, among which the resources of capacity appear most. This feature is consistent with the cultural nature of A Bite of China and reveals the writer’s high appreciation of the abilities of Chinese people. Within the subtype of affect, the value happiness and satisfaction make up the most part. This feature is in harmony with the active cultural atmosphere and positive values.This study is supposed to shed light on the application of appraisal theory to the documentary commentary, help to deepen the understanding of the interpersonal function of documentary and provide the writers with guidance in the writing of documentary.