A Study Of Attitude In English Art Criticism

Appraisal Theory has been raising scholars' interest home and abroad after it was proposed by J.R.Martin and his colleagues,and becomes a heated topic in the past two decades.Many foreign and domestic linguists devote time to working on the development and complement of the theory to perfect it in appraisal function,theoretical framework,concepts and pattern structure.Functional linguistic research focuses on the dimension of " implementation",and research on "instance" and"individuation" is relatively less available.However,Appraisal Theory provides a comprehensive method to realize "instance" and "individuation".With the help of corpus research methods and modern analysis methods in linguistics,the meaning of text as a whole is much extended in research.In addition to providing a theoretical method,Appraisal Theory is also a kind of empirical research method itself which has strong ability in both operation and application.It is widely involved in various fields including literature,art,philosophy,news,laws and so forth.At the very beginning,the initial research was mainly on narrative text.Later,it gradually extends to other fields like literary criticism,media news,politics and legislation.Overall,research in art is comparatively inadequate.Since the time of Appraisal Theory research is relatively short,especially in interdisciplinary aspect,it is greatly demanded to make further exploration.This thesis applies Appraisal Theory as a framework to analyzing the discourse of art criticism from the perspective of attitude system,analyzes 83 art critiques selected and studies the semantic meaning of emotion and valuation endowed by the writers in critical language.It makes an introduction on the foundation of Appraisal Theory,theoretical framework,development process,research conducted by domestic and foreign scholars,and then makes identification,analysis and classification on resources in corpus to explore the application of Appraisal theory in art criticism and summarize representation and feature of these attitudinal resource used.To ensure the objectivity and validity in this study,the author carries out a comprehensive application of multiple methods including descriptive,quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze data collected on the basis of corpus coding.The author concludes that the attitudinal resources all involve affect,judgement and appreciation but are distributed unevenly.Affect and judgement are more concerned in appraisal on the artist or the overview of artworks.The feature is shown that more appreciation than affect and judgement is involved,more positive meaning than negative meaning is conveyed,and more explicit way than implicit way is employed.Different from other genres like journal or literature criticism,description on artwork is an important part in artworks,so the subsystem of appreciation in Attitude system is correspondingly distinguished in the whole system framework.This study points out that the interpersonal relationship is established by "authority" and "alignment" to convey stances.The attitudinal resources contribute to the establishment of relationship among the writer,artworks and the potential reader effectively,and function well in appraisal by setting a "resonance" relationship between the artwork and the potential reader within person.