A Contrastive Analysis Of Appraisal Resources In Chinese And British Literary Fairy Tales

Based on interpersonal meaning of language proposed by Halliday,Martin put forward the Theory of Appraisal System.The theory deals with the language of evaluation from the perspective of lexis,revealing the deeper interpersonal meaning,so this analytical method is relatively more objective comparing with other theories or systems.The Appraisal System consists of three sub-systems,which are separately Attitude system,Engagement system and Graduation system.Numbers of scholars have applies the Appraisal System to corpus analysis of different areas and fully proved its practicability,but few of them apply it to the analysis of literary fairy tales.The thesis applies the Appraisal System to the field of literary fairy tales and makes a contrast between Chinese literary fairy tales and British literary fairy tales,trying to get the distribution of Appraisal resources in Chinese and British literary fairy tales by analyzing the Appraisal resources in Chinese and British literary fairy tales.So this thesis chooses ten Chinese literary fairy tales and ten British literary fairy tales,and analyzes the Appraisal resources from the perspectives of Attitude,Engagement and Graduation with the adoption of UAM Corpus Tool,aiming at finding out the similarities and differences of the distribution of Appraisal resources.After the contrastive analysis,it is found that Attitude resources take up the largest proportion in both Chinese and British literary fairy tales.The proportions of Engagement resources of the two groups are very close,but in British literary fairy tales,the proportion of Graduation resources is a little higher than that of Engagement resources.While in Chinese literary fairy tales,the proportion of Engagement resources is a little higher than that of Graduation resources.In the two groups,the positive resources are more frequently used than negative resources and the proportion of inscribed resources is obviously higher than invoked lexes.Within the Attitude system,there is no significant difference among Affect,Judgment and Appreciation resources.In Chinese literary fairy tales the proportion of Affect resources is a little higher than that in British literary fairy tales,while the proportion of Judgment and Appreciation are not as high as that in British literary fairy tales.Within Engagement system,more Contract resources are used in Chinese literary fairy tales while in British literary fairy tales more Expand resources are employed.Within the Graduation system,the same point of the two groups is that Force resources are more employed than Focus resources,the different point is that Force resources are more abundant in British literary fairy tale while Focus resources are more abundant in Chinese literary fairy tales.The study of this thesis clearly shows the distribution status of the Appraisal resources in Chinese and British literary fairy tales,which not only further proves the practicability of the Appraisal System in different fields,but also makes people have a direct impression and recognition of Chinese and British literary fairy tales,and it also further draws people's attention on the Appraisal System and literary fairy tales.