A Contrastive Study Of Attitude Resources In English And Chinese Prefaces Of Linguistics Academic Monographs

The Appraisal Theory is concerned with the interpersonal meanings in language,and it can be applied to study the evaluations in different kinds of discourses and the construction of interpersonal relationships.The theory includes three subsystems,among which the Attitude System focuses on the evaluation of people's feelings,stances,and attitudes.Therefore,it can be used as a theoretical framework in analyzing underlying feelings and opinions of authors in different discourses,like prefaces.Although many studies have been conducted on the Appraisal Theory and prefaces separately in recent years,only a few studies focus on the attitude resources in English and Chinese prefaces,especially the prefaces of academic monographs in the linguistics area.Thus,the usage of the attitude resources in both English and Chinese prefaces of linguistics academic monographs is worthy of study and research.Therefore,aiming to analyze the attitude resources used in prefaces,30 English and 30 Chinese academic monographs' prefaces in the linguistics area were collected to create two small prefaces corpora,and then they were annotated based on the Appraisal Theory put forward by Martin and White(2005).Furthermore,with the help of the instrument-UAM Corpus Tool,the statistic results including the occurrence,frequency and chi-square test results that indicate the significant differences in the attitude resources were calculated,and the social-cultural reasons behind the similarities and differences in the use of the attitude resources between English and Chinese were also explored.Specifically,the study attempts to answer the following three questions: 1)What similarities or/and differences exist in the overall usage of the attitude resources in the English and Chinese prefaces of linguistics academic monographs? 2)What similarities or/and differences exist in the usage of the attitude resources in the three subcategories of the Attitude System(Affect,Judgment and Appreciation)in the English and Chinese prefaces of linguistics academic monographs? 3)What might be the social-cultural reasons for these similarities or/and differences?The research results show that: 1)There are several similarities existing in the overall usage of the attitude resources in the selected English and Chinese prefaces,and the major findings are that the most commonly used subcategory of the Attitude System is Appreciation in both English(61.44%)and Chinese(46.99%)prefaces corpora;and the percentage of the Affect category is the lowest in both English(16.99%)and Chinese(20.08%)prefaces corpora.2)Some differences in the usage of the attitude resources in the three subcategories of the Attitude System are found.The main findings are that under the category of Judgment,English employs less social esteem resources than Chinese,with 18.30% in English and 28.92% in Chinese;and within the category of Appreciation,the valuation resources are more preferred in the English prefaces than in the Chinese prefaces(31.37% vs.20.88%).3)The similarities can possibly be explained by the shared features and communicative purpose of the preface genre and the objectiveness of the academic monograph genre;whereas the differences are owing to the social-cultural divergences between the West and China.This study is of both theoretical and practical significance.From the theoretical aspect,the study is expected to expand the application scope of the Appraisal Theory in analyzing discourses and hopes to provide new insight into the contrastive study of English and Chinese prefaces.From the practical perspective,the study can hopefully arouse the interest of English teachers to the usage of the attitude resources in academic monographs,and hence they can give targeted suggestions to learners.At the same time,the study may help learners understand how to express themselves better by using appropriate attitude resources and to get the authors' underlying stances and attitudes better.