A Comparative Study On Interpersonal Meaning In English Research Articles From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

In the current studies of linguistics,there is a tendency to place greater stress on the interpersonal meaning.Halliday(1970),the founder of Functional Grammar,classifies the metafunctions of language into three types,namely,ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function,and carries out the studies of interpersonal function or meaning on the basis of clause exchange.In order to perfect the study of interpersonal meaning,Martin and his colleagues build Appraisal Theory,enlarging interpersonal meaning study from lexico-grammar to discourse semantics.This theory,composed of three systems-attitude,engagement and graduation,is concerned with feelings or attitude,the ways to express feelings and the degree of the feelings expressed.When applying Appraisal Theory into the discourse analysis,researchers usually focus on how to use appraisal resources to express writers'/speakers' attitude towards opinions and events,and how to negotiate the relationship with readers/listeners.Up to now,Appraisal Theory has been applied in various genres,such as literary,news report,political speech and so on.However,only a small number of studies applied Appraisal Theory to academic discourse.What's more,comparative analysis,especially a comparison between the second language and the native language,is scarce.The present study complements the previous studies by applying Appraisal Theory into English research articles and making a comparison in interpersonal meaning realized by appraisal resources between Chinese scholars and English native scholars.This thesis is a corpus-based study.It respectively chooses 150 English research articles in petroleum and natural gas from 2011 to 2016 as the research materials to build two corpora.The English research articles by Chinese scholars are selected from Petroleum Science in China,and the English research articles by English native scholars are selected from AAPG Bulletin in America.Based on the data,the similarities and differences of interpersonal meaning as well as the reasons in English research articles are revealed and analyzed by comparing appraisal resources.This thesis adopts the quantitative and the qualitative methods.With the help of the advanced research tools—AntConc 3.4.4 w and SPSS 17.0,the thesis calculates proportions and word frequencies of appraisal resources and summarizes the following findings.First,the proportions of each appraisal resources by Chinese scholars and English native scholars are virtually similar.This may be due to the academic genre.The selection of appraisal resources should keep the objective and factual rules of academic discourse and also should persuade readers to accept their subjective academic arguments.Second,there exist no significant differences in the word frequencies of appraisal resources by Chinese scholars and English native scholars.However,English native scholars use relatively more attitude and engagement resources to highlight their voices,to establish a solid reader-writer relationship and to effectively convey their academic ideas.In contrast,Chinese scholars turn to relatively more graduation resources,especially the sub-resources of qualification,to be over objective by ignoring making their own voices stand out.The features of appraisal resources indicate that both the Chinese scholars and the English native scholars have basic appraisal awareness in academic writing,but the differences of choosing appraisal resources to realize interpersonal meaning may be due to the different values and beliefs.Third,as to the specific lexical realizations,Chinese scholars sometimes make verbal mistakes influenced by the limitations of vocabulary and the mother language.By exploring the features of using appraisal resources in English research articles written by Chinese scholars and English native scholars,this thesis reveals the similarities and differences of interpersonal meaning realized by the different appraisal choices as well as the potential reasons.Hopefully,this study will offer some implications for the Chinese scholars,academic writing in English and for further language teaching in China.