A Study On The Woman Warrior By Maxine Hong Kingston From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Maxine Hong Kingston (Tang Tingting in Chinese), as one of the most outstanding female Chinese American writers, her representative work:The Woman Warrior—Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts published in the year 1976 established her place in the history of Chinese American literature. The novel mainly depicts the heroine's psychological growing experiences of trying to establish her own cultural identity and gender identity in the dilemma of the conflicts between Chinese and American cultures. Since its publication, researchers have made many profound researches and gained fruitful results from the perspective of feminism, post modernism, multiculturalism and world novel. There are few researchers aiming at exploring the potential appraisal resources of this novel from the perspective of Appraisal Theory based on Systemic Functional Linguistics. Therefore, the author of this thesis is willing to attempt to do this research in this aspect.Appraisal Theory originally developed in the late 1990s, which was the new extension of Systemic Functional Linguistics in the aspect of interpersonal meaning. Appraisal Theory mainly concerned with the different attitudinal resources embodied in the discourse, the intensity of the emotion expressed in the discourse, the different way of embodying values and aligning readers. At present this theory has been applied in different kinds of texts such as media texts, news texts, and speech texts, but there were few researches do it on literary works. There are many appraisal resources in Maxine Hong Kingston's novel The Woman Warrior. On one hand, by the means of Appraisal Theory to analyze this literary work, it can provide a new perspective and construct a new framework for interpreting the profound appraisal resources in the novel. On the other hand, the abundant appraisal resources in the novel can supply the Appraisal Theory with powerful and interpretive corpus, and it also provides possible space for the development of Appraisal Theory in turn.By the means of Martin's Appraisal Theory, this research mainly analyzes appraisal resources on the lexical level, and then extends it to the syntactic level and text level. In this way, the author attempts to find the distribution and realization of appraisal resources and at the same time tries to explore the role of appraisal resources in establishing the interpersonal meaning of characters.Data analysis of this novel indicates that:In the subsystem of Attitude, Affect has a relatively high proportion compared to Judgement and Appreciation. The number of appraisal resources of Affect, Judgement and Appreciation is 765,495,248, and the respective proportion is 50.7%,32.8% and 16.5%. In addition, the proportion of the subcategories of Attitude is uneven. Affect takes the highest proportion, and thus in this way the reader can know the character's inner thoughts more vividly. Many noun forms, nominal groups, verbs, adjectives and adverbs can also be used to realize Attitude.In the subsystem of Engagement, the number of appraisal resources of Disclaim is 42.5%, ranking as the largest proportion compared to the other three appraisal resources. The proportion of appraisal resources among Proclaim, Entertain and Attribute is 15.8%, 29.4% and 12.3% respectively. In the subcategories of Engagement, namely, the Dialogic Contraction and Dialogic Expansion, the respective proportion is 58.3% and 41.7%. To put it in another way, the number of Dialogic Contraction and Dialogic Expansion is quite similar, among which Disclaim and Entertain outnumber the other two appraisal resources. Disclaim can be realized by the means of negative words and it can also be realized through some comment adjuncts or adverbials. Proclaim sometimes can be realized via rhetorical or "leading" questions. Entertain can be realized via modal auxiliaries, modal adjuncts, mental verb projections and some types of "rhetorical" or "expository" questions. Attribute is realized typically by the means of indirect reported speech, mental process verbs and various adverbial adjuncts.In the subsystem of Graduation, the appraisal resources of Force are different from the appraisal resources of Focus. The proportion of Force and Focus is 85.9% and 14.1% respectively. The writer has a strong preference to use Force. In addition, the raising evaluation is twice as much as the lowering evaluation. The proportion of raising evaluation and lowering evaluation is 54.8% and 31.1%. In the subcategories of Focus, the proportion of sharpening evaluation and softening evaluation is 9.1% and 5%. Briefly speaking, the evaluation of grading up outnumbers grading down in this novel. Force can be realized via adverbs and the comparative or superlative forms of adjectives. Focus can be realized via certain adjectives and adjective phrases.Besides the appraisal resources existing on the lexical level, there are many appraisal resources exist on the syntactic level and text level. On the syntactic level, appraisal resources can be realized through Marked Theme and Subjunctive Mood. Besides this, appraisal resources can also be realized through "cleft sentence", "the ing-form of some cognitive verbs", "disjunctive question", "emphatic sentence", "comparative sentence" and "total negation" due to certain situations. For evaluation on the text level, it is mainly realized through two aspects, namely the narrative point of view and semantic coherence.This thesis tentatively analyzes the appraisal resources in the novel—The Woman Warrior under the framework of Appraisal Theory from three different levels, namely, the lexical level, syntactic level and text level and thus broadens the applications of Appraisal Theory and therefore provides a new theoretical perspective for studying and interpreting the novel. In this way, it shows the practicability and interpretive power of the Appraisal Theory and broadens its application. In addition, the Appraisal Theory is unique in analyzing the interpersonal meaning of literary works. Not only is this research helpful for the appreciation of literary works, but also helpful for the teaching of literature. Therefore, using the Appraisal Theory to analyze literary works is a new perspective which can be used in the literature appreciation and research works.