A Study Of Reader's Positioning: An Appraisal-Adaptational Perspective

The present study is an attempt to conduct a systematic and dynamic study of reader's positioning in contemporary English media discourse by drawing on J. R. Martin's Appraisal System and Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory and incorporating them into a tentative Appraisal-Adaptational framework. This framework will not only serve for the analysis of the processes of reader's positioning but also provide some explanative basis for better understanding and better managing the issue of multiplicity of meanings in reading.The data are taken from written media discourses, mainly those texts from mass audience communications, journalism, politics and etc. which are usually ideologically charged, highlighting the impact of evaluation on various dimensions of interpersonal politics in our troubled times. In studying the data, we are interested in how texts are coordinated in arguments by the participants separated in time and space. We have selected altogether 60 texts, which are classified into 6 groups from the perspective of their semantic meanings and the perspective of reader's positioning. Among the groups we have chosen one group of six texts as our sample texts for this study. This group of texts all refer to the 9/11 Event, among which the earliest released text by Bush is taken as the writer's text in which Bush states his ideas on the 9/11 attacks, the attackers/terrorists, the victims and the counter-terrorist war. The subsequently released 5 texts by Blair, bin Laden, the Dalai Lama, an American scholar and an Arabian commentator are regarded as the reader's texts since all of them make responses to the above topics in Bush's text. The criterion of this classification based on the notion of "dialogical network" introduced by Leudar and Nekvapil is that all the texts are related to each other not merely by the virtue of referring to the same event but networked interactively, thematically and argumentatively, usually with the latter one responding to the former one (s). One text does not necessarily directly respond to the writer of the former text, the core is they are dialogically, thematically and argumentatively linked.Methodologically, the study is carried out mainly as a qualitative study, but is combined to some degree with quantitative analyses so as to highlight the important points in our theoretical building of readers' positioning. All the sample texts are divided into clause complexes measured for the frequencies of different kinds of Attitude, and analyzed for Attitude positioning under which the subsystems, namely, the appraisal choices of Affect, Judgment and Appreciation will be examined one by one to scrutinize reader's Affectual, Judgmental and Appreciative positioning. We find that different texts prefer different types of Attitude, some types of Attitude are dominant, others may be marginalized or simply omitted in some texts. All these can be quite suggestive. We propose that the causes of this unbalanced use of appraisal patterns should be found in the exploration of the adaptation between appraisal choices and the context in which they are chosen or affected. And accordingly, different reader's positioning is also proposed to function as a result of appraisal choice making and their adaptation to different contexts. Thus, the relationship between Appraisals and Adaptation is established.At the beginning of the essay, by associating the concept of appraisal with the concept of positioning we give a working definition of reader's positioning in order to avoid confusion with similar and relevant terms. Thus the relationship between Appraisals and Positioning is established. Then, on the basis of the clarification of the relationship between Appraisal and Positioning, between Appraisal and Adaptation and on the basis of expounding the essentials for analyzing reader's positioning, the theoretical framework for analyzing reader's positioning is worked out by situating Appraisal system in Adaptational theory which can provide explanative basis for appraisal choices.The framework attempts to demonstrate the comprehensive process of analyzing reader's positioning in texts by bringing together reader's positioning in production and reader's self-positioning in interpretation, each of which is indispensable for a better understanding of the whole picture of reader's positioning. Before scrutinizing the functioning of reader's positioning within this Appraisal-Adaptational framework in both the two processes of reader's positioning in production and in interpretation through analysis of the empirical data, we also explore the variability of resources for reader's positioning since in the process of producing reader's position(s), the writer/reader has to make constant appraisal choices. Whether reader's positioning is successful or not is supposed to be largely determined by the effectiveness of appraisal choices. So this exploration is of crucial importance to the fulfillment of reader's positioning in terms of appraisal options accessible to language users.According to the framework, reader's positioning in production is postulated from the perspective of the writer, who projects an ideal reader in the text in an attempt to coerce the reader to step into the intended reading position by the "obviousness", "naturalness", "commonsensicalness" and "taken-for-grantedness" of his opinions or appraisals. This positioning is explored specifically from the Attitude dimension arising from Appraisal System, namely, Attitude positioning, so as to display the writer's naturalizing process in detail with specific linguistic and semantic evidences/resources. Here Attitude positioning is defined to be concerned with how the writer's value positions go to work on readers or invite readers to supply their own evaluations by indicating an authorial or non-authorial, subjective or objective, explicit or implicit, and positive or negative evaluation of emotions (Affect), human behaviour (Judgment) and things (Appreciation). Our Analysis of Bush's text indicates that the use of positive appraisals oriented towards "us" (here mainly America and American people) and negative appraisals oriented towards "them" seems a natural and common practice in war discourse. The explicit nature of the preferred appraisal patterns and the authorial projection of emotion and judgment in them all arise from the writer's high extent of modeling the reader as sharing the writer's position(s). The high preference for encoding moral Judgment, personal Affect and Social Valuation (under Appreciation) demonstrates that the writer is more inclined to argue on emotional, ethical, and social conventional grounds.Reader's positioning in interpretation is postulated from the perspective of the reader, who as many researchers have found, have their own subjectivity to position themselves in various ways. Thus, readers may not necessarily reproduce preferred reading or accept the naturalized positions. They are likely to be different. So we explore the variability of reader's positioning in order to find out the ranges of reader positions. Based on the two mainstream reader position studies by Stuart Hall and Pace de Certeau, we find different types of reader positions that have been distinguished so far mainly fall into four categories: compliant, tactical, negotiated and oppositional. But the four categories are absolutely not clear-cut. We think reader's positioning should display greater variability. It is possible for the types of reader's positioning to formulate along a cline from the most compliant to the most opponent, with the in-betweens being diversified in the tendency toward the two polarities to different degrees. Our subsequent analyses devoted to the researching on this variability from our data have proved this point. And our analyses of interpretive reader's positioning from the Appraisal-Adaptational approach display the deconstructing process with specific examples from five texts to find out how each writer (as the reader of Bush' s speeches) positions themselves and what positions they take up. This is different from the past researches which put forward excellent theories about readers but more often than not lack specific linguistic evidences that prompt them to come into being.In interpretive reader's positioning, the same approach as that in reader's positioning in production is used, the difference is that the central task of positioning in production is to position readers by generating meaning while the central task of interpretive positioning is to self-position readers by tracing the meaning generated in text by the writer. The examination of the five sample texts shows that Blair is not only compliant, but indeed actively or extra-compliant as Bush's reader; while bin Laden is not only opponent, but indeed overly opponent/resistant as Bush's reader; the Dalai Lama cunningly takes up a tactical position; the other two peace-lovers from America and Arab take up their separate negotiated positions with different degrees of negotiation. Our analyses of all the sample texts reveal and prove the post-modern reading view that any text can be read in many ways, may be in thousands of thousands of ways (theoretically). Such issue of explosive complexity of texts and multiplicity of meanings can be better understood and managed by using this Appraisal-Adaptational approach without placing unnecessary limitations on the range of voices which enter into dialogue with one another.A close check and verification of the cases of the appraisal choice making in our data on the basis of the analysis and discussion of reader's positioning in production and interpretation demonstrates that appraisal choices make adaptations to various objects of context, including variables of Physical World, variables of Social World and variables of Mental World. In Physical world, readers make adaptations to temporal-spatio coordinates and material conditions; in Social World, readers make adaptations to social norms and conventions, culture and politics, social relations and persona-building; in Mental World, readers make adaptations to psychological motivations and emotions. Of course, unavoidably, there exist the possibilities of integration or overlapping in the three categories of adaptation. So they are still open to future endeavors. Generally, our adaptation scrutinization reveals that to some degree it is adaptation that gives an individual reader his agency to position himself not as what the writer intends or differently from other readers.