| With the vigorous development of mass media and film industry,the film industry ushered in a brand new era.At the same time,movie reviews,as an evaluation style closely related to the movie,receives more and more attention.Movie review is a special evaluation style based on the appraisal resources and is becoming more and more important in modern society.The Appraisal theory is based on Halliday's systematic functional grammar.James Martin developed it in the 1990s,focusing on how people use language to evaluate things,express their attitudes and take positions to adjust their positions.Appraisal theory focuses on the significance of evaluation by studying the interpersonal meaning of various discourses.It consists of three major sub-systems:Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.Attitude is the core of Appraisal theory.This thesis attempts to use appraisal theory as the theoretical framework to analyze and study the attitude resources in online film reviews of American inspirational movie The Shawshank Redemption.This thesis selects 30 online movie reviews as the data,and they are all English film reviews downloaded from IMDb.The thesis uses qualitative and quantitative methods.The specific research methods are as follows:in the data analysis,first of all,the author collects descriptions and discourses related to The Shawshank's Redemption.The author also collects and annotates the attitudinal resources and divides them into affect,judgment and appreciation respectively.The characteristics,categories and distribution of evaluation resources in the data will be analyzed.In this study,the author tries to answer the following questions:1)What are the distribution features of the attitude sub-system of appraisal resources in the movie reviews of The Shawshank Redemption?2)Are there any differences and similarities of the distributions of attitudinal resources in English movie reviews of The Shawshank Redemption?After studying the related data,the following conclusions were drawn:(1)Film reviewers choose different attitudinal resources when evaluating different aspects of the movie.When the reviewers evaluate the movie as a whole,they usually use Affect resources and Appreciation resources,and under this circumstance,they use little Judgment resources.However,when the reviewers evaluate the characters,they adopt Judgment resources most frequently;(2)The distribution features of the attitude resources in the movie reviews are different in some way and it also shows some similarities.In the data,Appreciation are mostly used in appreciating the movie as a whole and in assessing the plot and scene.Judgment resources take up 23.77%and in the movie reviews that are selected in this study,those Judgement resources are mostly used to assess Andy and Red,the two main characters.In the meantime,Affect is mostly adopted in the overall evaluation.The similarity of the distribution is that when evaluating the movie on the whole and when evaluating the plot and scene,only Affect and Appreciation are used.Judgement is not used in the evaluation of both these two aspects.This research enriches the research related to movie reviews and appraisal theory,which is helpful for the development of appraisal theory and movie reviews. |
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