Analysis Of A Woman Of No Importance Based On Graduation Within Apprasial Theory

Based on the framework of Graduation—the metonymic expression of Attitude and Engagement within Appraisal Theory,the thesis examines the distribution of Graduation resources in A Woman of No Importance,one of Wilde's four comedies,to explore the impacts of gradability on constructing the dandy identity and naturalizing reading position,and thus untangling the aesthetic riddle of the understudied drama and providing insights for the following research on the drama of Wilde and other playwrights from the perspective of Graduation.As Wilde's second social comedy,the witty dialogues in A Woman of No Importance full of poetic,colloquial,implicit,rhetorical and individualized features.Large quantities of paradoxes and evaluative lexis of different degrees of values are the best material for discursive analysis.The tension of paradoxical lexis with graduation properties centering on the prototypicality and scalability in the drama needs to be further explored from a new perspective.Appraisal Theory focusing on the attitudes under negotiation,the strength of the feelings of relevance as well as how values are sourced and readers construed in the text provides a new perspective of semantics of evaluation to probe into the interpersonal meaning in the literary discourse analysis.As one of its subsystems,Graduation,subcategorized into Force and Focus,plays an essential part in the whole Appraisal system and gradability is a general property of all attitudinal meanings and engagement values.The thesis first uses UAM CorpusTool to annotate the eight sample texts of eight typical characters in A Woman of No Importance according to the schemes based on the Appraisal framework.Subsequently,with the overall distribution of Graduation resources,the gradability of attitudinal meanings and engagement values,it makes comparative data analysis of each character to further investigate the operation of Graduation.With such analytical tools as Force versus Focus;Upscaling versus Downscaling;Force: Quantification versus Qualification;Force: Infusion versus Isolation versus Repetition;Focus: Sharpen versus Soften;attitudinal meanings versus engagement values,the thesis finds that Graduation resources are strategically distributed in A Woman of No Importance and exert great impacts on dandy identity construction and textual naturalization.The overwhelming proportion of Force,Upscaling,Intensification,Isolation and the more frequent choice of dialogic contraction than expansion modulate gradable attitudes and value strength,and non-gradable prototypical category,conveying attitudinal feelings infused with authorial stance as well.What's more,attitudinal meanings in the play are more of median value which suggests the upper class tends to intensify attitudes in conversations,while engagement values are more of low value,indicating the upper class tend to share less conversational responsibility generally.Through upscaling semantic value,parody is maximized,Judgement and Appreciation invoked,the dandy identity shaped and reading position naturalized,thus aestheticism realized.