A Study Of Attitudinal Resources In Letters To His Son From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

The family letter is an excellent way to strengthen the relationship among family members and reflect mutual care.Meanwhile,the family letter is also a concentrated embodiment and important carrier of a family's values and viewpoints,serving as a valuable written material for the research of family education.Appraisal Theory(AT)was proposed and developed by James Martin which studied how people used language to evaluate things and express their own attitudes.Attitude,engagement and graduation are the three subsystems of AT.Among them,attitude system is the core of AT.In this thesis,AT is taken as the theoretical framework to analyze attitudinal resources in the Letters to His Son,from which letters No.201 to No.225 are selected as data.A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is adopted to answer the following three questions:1)What are the distributions of the three sub-categories of AT in Letters to His Son?2)What are the differences and similarities in the distributions of three sub-categories in discussion about different themes?3)What are the functions of attitude resources in these letters?The words and phrases related to the three sub-categories of attitude resources in the original text are first collected.Then various attitude resources are classified and marked.Finally the characteristics,categories and distributions of attitude resources in the data are compared and analyzed.Major findings of the study are as follows,Firstly,among these letters,there are totally 622 attitudinal resources.In all of these resources,Chesterfield uses appreciation resources(303)the most frequently,taking up 48.7%.Affect(196)ranks second which accounts for 31.5%.Judgement isused the least,totaling 123 and taking up 19.8%.At the same time,these resources can be divided into positive and negative ones.There are totally 420 positive attitudinal resources,with 149 affect resources,92 judgement resources and 179 appreciation resources.There are totally 202 negative attitudinal resources,with 47 affect resources,31 judgement resources and 124 appreciation resources.Secondly,these letters can be divided into 4 types: discussions about political and current events,about his son,about the Earl of Chesterfield himself,and about some daily affairs.The similar and different distributions of attitudinal resources in these 4 types are presented here in detail:1)As for similarities,firstly,the number of resources in discussions about himself and some daily affairs is very close,for the reason that both of them involve a similar amount of paragraphs.Secondly,in discussions about political events,about his son,about himself and some daily affairs,appreciation resources are all utilized the most frequently.Because discussions about political events,about himself and some daily affairs are more associated with evaluation of different sorts of things,not judgement made on behaviors.Even when he educates his son,he also makes evaluations.Another reason is that using more appreciation can make these letters more objective.Thirdly,the number of judgement and appreciation is the same in discussions about himself while the number of affect and judgement is the same in some daily affairs.2)When it comes to differences,the biggest difference is that almost all of attitudinal resources are employed in discussions about political events and about his son,while few attitudinal resources are used in discussions about himself and some daily affairs.The reason is that The reason is that Chesterfield doesn't focus his letters more on himself and also daily affairs.Secondly,Chesterfield uses more affect resources than judgement resources in discussions about political events and about his son.On the contrary,he uses more judgement than affect in discussions about himself.When he discusses political events and educates his boy,Chesterfield often passes on his thoughts of political situation and also delivers the ideas that he is proud of his son and shows his great expectations,which certainly contains a great number of affectresources.But he usually makes judgement on behaviors when he discusses about himself,which contains more judgement resources.We can also find that in these four types,all positive attitudinal resources are used more than negative ones.Thirdly,there are two functions of attitudinal resources in these letters.On the one hand,they can undertake family education functions.On the other hand,they can help to undertake communication functions.This function can be divided into 2 kinds,first is to exchange information and the second is to express love and care.In a word,AT has a significant role in deeply studying family letters.Through this research,the author hopes to enrich and promote the academic research of AT in research of family letters.