| With the development of the society and the technology of the internet,online book reviews have become a new form of language used in discourse evaluation.They have specific linguistic characteristics and evaluative style.This thesis studies the online customer fiction reviews from the perspective of J.R.Martin's Appraisal Theory(AT).And the corpus of this study is online customer fiction reviews of the novel The Kite Runner fromhttp://www.Amazon.com.The purpose of this study is to analyze the evaluative resources in online customer fiction reviews of The Kite Runner,and study the evaluative meaning of online customer fiction reviews by analyzing the negative and positive evaluative meanings and elaborates their evaluative system.This thesis has three research questions: First,what are the evaluative characteristics and evaluative style of the evaluative resources of online customer fiction reviews? Second,what are the features of evaluative meanings of online customer fiction reviews? Third,what is the evaluative system of online customer fiction reviews?In order to answer these three research questions,firstly,this study reviews the appraisal theory system,and gives an introduction to the three main systems and their subsystems;secondly,the author classifies the evaluative resources of online customer fiction reviews according to AT;thirdly,the author analyzes the evaluative characteristics and the evaluative style of the evaluative resources of online customer fiction reviews;finally,the author sums up the features of the evaluative meaning and elaborates the evaluative system of online customer fiction reviews.From the corpus that is collected,this thesis extracts 100 online customer fiction reviews of the novel The Kite Runner,and identifies 1022 evaluative resources in total.The analysis has rendered the following findings:(1)The evaluative resources of attitude system occupy the largest percentage among the evaluative resources in online customer fiction reviews;the evaluative resources of graduation system occupy the second place in the percentage among the evaluative resources;the evaluativev resources of engagement system occupy the smallest percentage.(2)The evaluative resources in the online customer fiction reviews of The Kite Runner are mainly used for the evaluation of the novel itself,the writing of the novel,the story of the novel,and the characters in the novel.(3)As to the characteristics of evaluative resources,the evaluative resources of attitude system are mainly in the form of adjectives,seldom in the form of verbs;the evaluative resources of graduation system are mainly comparative degree,superlative degree,and words of degree,which achieve the effect of stressing and modifying attitude system;the evaluative resources of engagement system are mainly adverbs and conjunctions,which decide on the significant meaning of the evaluation.(4)The evaluative meaning is mainly expressed by the meaning of the evaluative resources,which includes their lexical meaning and contextual meaning.(5)The evaluative style is mainly expressed by the use of the negative words,which decide the significant meaning of the evaluation,and by the use of the figures of speech like antiphrasis and repetition,which heighten the degree of evaluation.(6)The evaluative resources which can not be clearly classified into certain types of the appraisal system are classified into two new types after the analysis: the evaluative emotion,and the evaluative quantity sentence.(7)The evaluative system of online customer fiction reviews is elaborated from the perspective of the objects of evaluation.This evaluative system can be divided into four main categories: the evaluation of the story in the novel,the evaluation of the novel itself,the evaluation of the writing of the novel,and the evaluation of the characters in the novel.And each category can be further divided into more specific categories: the evaluation of the story contains the description of the content of the story,the expression of the reviewers' feelings for the story after their reading,and the overall evaluation of the story in the novel;the evaluation of the novel itself contains the expression on the reviewers' feelings for the novel,and the overall evaluation on the novel;the evaluation of the writing of the novel contains the evaluation on the language used in story,and the writing style of the novel;the evaluation of the characters in the novel contains the features of the characters,and the reviewers' attitudes towards the characters.And its evaluative meaning is realized by themeaning of the appraisal system and its subsystems.This thesis has important meaning for the study of online customer fiction reviews,and its writing and reading.Also,this study is an application and revision of the Appraisal Theory. |
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