Signaling Discourse:The Textual Functions Of Comment Adjuncts

In our daily verbal or written communication,evaluative resources are used to express comments,opinions,attitudes,or judgments on part or whole of a proposition,especially in academic discourses such as book reviews.Comment Adjuncts,as a type of language resources,present both the interpersonal and the textual metafunction in discourses.However,researches have been devoted to the interpersonal functions of Comment Adjuncts,while the textual functions are quite neglected.Even if there are sporadic studies on the textual functions of Comment Adjuncts,they are not comprehensive and systematic.Thus,this study will be devoted to the textual functions of Comment Adjuncts in book reviews to explore how Comment Adjuncts help to achieve the cohesion of texts.Comment Adjuncts have become a new linguistic focus of researchers since Halliday and Messison revised Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics in 2004.Systemic Functional Linguistic has become a main theoretical basis for the studies of Comment Adjuncts.Based on Halliday's textual function system and Martin's appraisal system in 2004,this study proposes its own analytical framework at two levels.At the micro-level,it aims to study how Comment Adjuncts realize textual function in the theme-rheme structure,and how they,as “conjunctions”,help to construct logic connections between clauses in discourses.At the macro-level,the study discusses how Comment Adjuncts participate in organizing texts coherently through expressing attitude and engagement.Through the qualitative and quantitative analyses of the data,this study draws the following conclusions.First,the textual functions of Comment Adjuncts can be realized from two different levels: clauses and discourses.On one hand,Comment Adjuncts help to structure the text by serving as theme and “conjunctions”,and on the other hand,Comment Adjuncts assist in organizing the attitude and information chains in the discourse through attitude meaning and engagement meaning.Second,Comment Adjuncts,at the beginning of a sentence,not only can convey new and project the following information,but can be used as implicit cohesive ties between sentences to construct concessive,expectancy,alternative,paradigmatic and progressive relationships.Third,as appraisal resources,Comment Adjuncts expressing attitude construct harmonious and coherent attitude chains in discourses,while Comment Adjuncts construct information or attitude chains through expressing engagement.The study of the textual functions of Comment Adjuncts provides a relatively comprehensive and systematic study perspective,which theoretically enriches the study of Comment Adjuncts and textual functions and practically provides a new perspective in writing or analyzing the texts for the teachers and students.