Discourse Analysis Of Mengzi From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Mencius is a great thinker and educationist, he is called sage. For more than two thousandyears, the Confucianism has a profound impact on Chinese culture. It not only dominates theideology of all fields, but also affects all aspects of social life. As a representative of the classicConfucian culture, Mengzi, which is the carrier of Mencius’ idea, has a profound impact onChina’s ancient society. This book recorded the political activities, doctrine and philosophy,moral principles and education ideology of the whole life of Mencius by way of narration anddialogue. The language impact of Mengzi on later generations can not be ignored. Today, manyidioms in Chinese derive from Mengzi, such as “wu shi bu xiao bai bu”,“yuan mu qiu yu”,“yamiao zhu zhang”etc. Previous scholars have made great achievements by doing research onMengzi from the perspective of text research or connotation research. Scholars in foreignlanguage world mainly concentrated on Mengzi translation studies, at present there is still notmuch analysis from the perspective of discourse analysis.The Appraisal Theory is put forward by James R. Martin. It is a new lexico-grammaticalframework for studying interpersonal meaning. It is concerned with attitudes and evaluationnegotiable in a text. In other words，evaluation is the remark how the speaker/writer thinks abouta person, a thing or an event, whether it is “good” or “bad”,“right” or “wrong”. The AppraisalTheory divides the appraisal resources into three aspects: attitude, engagement, judgement.Mengzi is full of attitudes and appraisals that Mencius and his disciples offer towards doctrine ofbenevolence，learning and teaching, polities and so on. Therefore, the Appraisal Theory providesus with a proper theory to interpret the interpersonal meaning in Mengzi. Mengzi, to which theAppraisal theory has not been applied, becomes a new kind of material to verify its explanatorypower.We select the first chapter of each volume of Mengzi as our data. Both quantitativeapproach and qualitative approach are involved in this thesis, focusing on the qualitativeapproach. Based on the analysis, we find that positive attitudes in Mengzi play an important rolein abridging the interpersonal gap among Mencius and his disciples and the putative readers,which dues to the effectively use of affect, judgement and appreciation. Located under theheteroglossic background，Mengzi employs more resources of dialogistic contraction to fend offalternative positions, in order to make his position more persuasive. However, resources ofdialogistic expansion are used to permit the existence of other positions, to invite more readers tojoin the conversation, and thereby persuade them to accept Mencius and his disciples’ position.Under Graduation, resources of force-raising and focus-sharpening make Mencius and hisdisciples’ position at a strong momentum. The present study aims to study the appraisal meaning in Mengzi within the framework ofthe Appraisal Theory, which provides a new theoretical perspective to interpret Mengzi.Meanwhile, it tries to verify the strong explanatory power of Appraisal Theory and providessome useful implications for its further applications in ancient Chinese and other domains.