An Analysis On The Evaluation Words In The Great Gatsby From The Perspective Of The Appraisal Theory

It has been a long history for people to do the analysis of literary works,and the research of literary work is always from the perspective of literary criticism and stylistics.From a linguistic point of view,literary works also belong to a kind of discourse.This thesis attempts to analyze the evaluation words in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby from the perspective of linguistic theory—Martin's the Appraisal Theory.There are not so much researchers and scholars at home and abroad to analyze The Great Gatsby from the perspective of the Appraisal Theory.The Appraisal Theory as a new way serves to understand this novel and the characters by the analysis of evaluation words and their distribution.So this is another useful application of the Appraisal Theory in new problems which attempts to lay the groundwork for further development.The Appraisal Theory is based on Halliday's systemic functional linguistic theory.It is derived from the interpersonal metafunction,and is widely used in discourse analysis.The theory is proved to be not only systematic,but also very practical.The Appraisal Theory has three subsystems: attitudinal system,engagement system and graduation system.Attitude subsystem includes affect system,judgment system and appreciation system.Engagement subsystem covers all those resources by which the textual or authorial voice is positioned inter-subjectively.The system of graduation is to grade phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories are blurred.This thesis takes these three theoretical subsystems as the framework,and then the selected corpus in this novel is analyzed.Through the evaluation of vocabulary,this thesis can evaluate the language users' ideology.Because it reveals things and connotation that the other linguistics cannot or rarely reveal,its application prospects are very broad.Through the analysis in thesis,it can conclude that Attitude resources account for high proportion compared with engagement resources and graduation resources,within which affect resources are used widely in this novel,judgment resources take up the second place,and appreciation resources are in the third place.The analysis of engagement resources shows that contractive resources are more than expansive resource.The analysis of graduation resources indicates that force resources exceed focus resources.By the analysis of the appraisal words and the distribution,this thesis helps readers to unscramble the theme of this novel from the perspective of linguistics,whichwill be the creative point of this thesis.Through the study,it found that on the analysis of literary works,the Appraisal Theory has a very strong and powerful interpretation.This study is of great theoretical and practical significance to the analysis of the novel The Great Gatsby by using the Appraisal Theory.This thesis includes three parts: introduction,body and conclusion,and the body part consists of four chapters.The main contents are as follows:The first part is the introduction part.This part is mainly composed of the background of the research,the research purpose,the significance of the research,the research methods.The second part of the thesis is the body,which is composed of three chapters:The first chapter mainly introduces contents of the Appraisal theory,and reviews the previous studies on the Appraisal Theory at home and abroad.The Appraisal Theory is derived from Halliday's systemic functional linguistics.This theory is divided into three subsystems: attitude,engagement and graduation,which is correspondingly divided into affect,judgment and appreciation;monoglossia and heteroglossia;force and focus.This chapter provides the theoretical framework for the data analysis in the following chapters.In the second chapter,based on the attitude system,the chosen attitude resources will be analyzed in The Great Gatsby,which focuses on the evaluation of the emotion,behavior and the appreciation to the behavior of the main characters in this novel,trying to depict the essential personalities of the characters by the frequency and distribution of the evaluation words.There are three parts.These three parts accordingly present the analysis of the distribution of affect,judgment and appreciation resources in the selected materials,through which we can see how author utilizes the affect,judgment and appreciation words to show the author's attitude towards main characters and portray the characters.In the third chapter,based on the engagement system,the chosen engagement resources will be analyzed in The Great Gatsby.The language user makes use of the engagement resources to negotiate his responsibility and obligation for what he writes or speaks,which can better reveal the writing intention and the theme of the novel.This chapter contains two parts.The first part analyzes the distribution of dialogic contract inthe selected materials in detail.The second analyzes the distribution of dialogic expand in the selected materials in detail.In the forth chapter,based on the graduation system,the chosen graduation resources will be analyzed in The Great Gatsby.By the scaling degree of the attitude or engagement resources and also the influence of the author on the relationship with the reader,the attitude of the writer or speaker towards the reader or listener will be more understandable,which can help to shape the characterization in this novel.There are two parts.The first part analyzes the distribution of force resources in the selected material.In the second part,the analysis of the distribution of the focus resources will be presented in detail,and then this part will discuss the writer-reader relationship by scaling the degree of engagement.The last part is the conclusion.In this part,the summary for the previous discussion is given and the feasibility of applying the Appraisal Theory to the analysis of the novel is validated.In the meantime,this thesis points out the limitation of the research and gives some improving advice for the future studies.The Appraisal Theory,as an effective text analysis tool,helps readers to understand the relationship between characters in the works;to figure out the motivation of the author and speaker;to analyze the characteristics and the theme of this novel.By analyzing the appraisal resources,especially the lexical items which are used to describe the characters and environment,a new study approach will be provided for the appreciation of the charming language in the classical literature and in turn it proves the practicability of the Appraisal Theory.