Attitude Change: A Study On Appraisal Resources In Discourse Of The Corrected In Community Correction

The system of community correction was established by China in 2003.By far,the system is still imperfect and immature in legislation and judicial practice when compared with that of developed countries.As opposed to traditional imprisonment of China,community correction,as a non-custodial penalty,exploits more social resources to help the criminals to correct themselves and reintegrate into society and community,such as government's purchasing the service of social work institutions,neighborhood committee's assistance at finding a new job,which coincides with the idea of restorative justice in international community.This thesis is totally based on the judicial practice of community correction.Through the platform established by Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and Guangzhou Justice Bureau and related social work institutions,our project members participated in the judicial activities and collected the data of eight community correction cases by means of fieldwork and ethnographic methodology,almost 90,000 Chinese characters,including interviews between the corrected and social workers or psychological counselors.After processing the data in accordance with the law and regulations,appraisal resources of the corrected are analyzed to explore their attitudes during community correction in the perspective of attitude both in social psychology and appraisal theory of J.R.Martin.Affective,behavioral and cognitive information indicating attitudes of the corrected would be obtained from the criminals' affect,judgment and appreciation of the crime,community correction and themselves,the reasons of which shall also be explored by means of the cognitive dissonance theory.According to aforesaid analysis,findings have been found as follows: 1.Attitudes of the corrected differ from each other from their arrest to community correction.Some are positive,while others negative.2.Different criminals have showed different attitude change during the process,some have been negative all the time,while others have a large shift,from negative to positive.3.Whether attitudes of the corrected shift is based on the following reasons: first,whether the corrected consider the sentence as a threat;second,whether the consequences were foreseeable to the corrected before their arrest;third,whether the corrected consider themselves responsible for the consequences.Through field studies and attitudinal analysis of the corrected,the writer hopes to provide theoretical guide for social workers and all participants in CC to acquire a clearer knowledge of the real mental state of the corrected in the course of CC,thus better carrying out their work and further promoting forensic linguistic studies to contribute to the judicial practice and progress of China.