APPRECIATION Systems In English Movie Reviews: An Appraisal Approach

The English movie reviews in newspapers, a subgenre of reviews and in turn part of thebroad newspaper discourse, capture the attention of researches in recent years. A great manysubstantial studies have been conducted on this genre from different points of views. However,English journalistic movie reviews have been rarely studied from the perspective of AppraisalTheory.Appraisal Theory is a relatively new development and enrichment of interpersonalmeanings in systemic functional linguistics (SFL). It mainly “studies the kinds of attitudesthat are negotiated in a text, the strength of the feelings involved and the ways in which valuesare sourced and readers aligned”(Martin,2003:23). Although it has been widely applied in thediscourse studies, especially news discourse, there are a great many genres to which it has notbeen applied or rarely applied, and English journalistic movie reviews is one which is rarelystudied.In the present study, the author conducts a systematic analysis of the APPRECIATIONsystem in English movie reviews from4perspectives, namely, APPRECIATION types,APPRECIATION elements to be appreciated, APPRECIATION realizations andAPPRECIATION position, attempting to explore the overall distribution pattern of them andtheir textual distribution pattern in the four stages, namely, Introduction, Plot-description,Evaluation and Conclusion. A corpus of72English movie reviews texts, with a total of62,503words, is selected from New York Times (NYT) published from January,2010toDecember,2010. Quantitative approach is employed in the process of analyzing the samples,and it is assisted by the analytical tool UAM Corpus tool. On the basis of the research designand data analysis, the present study has reached the following conclusions:Firstly, regarding APPRECIATION types, there are abundant APPRECIATION resourcesin the72selected English movie reviews. The overall distributions of the five types ofAPPRECIATION resources (IMPACT, QUALITY, BALANCE, COMPLEXITY, andVALUATION) are varied. The frequency of IMPACT (36.83%) is the highest among the five,whereas QUALITY takes32.63%, VALUATION takes20.29%; COMPLEXITY and BALANCE only takes6.57%and3.50%respectively.The APPRECIATION resources concerning “part of movie” all take up a majority ofIMPACT (68.0%), BALANCE (66.9%), COMPLEXITY (67.5%) and VALUATION (66.4%)except for QUALITY, in which “part of movie” accounts for47.3%and other things accountfor38.7%.Secondly, regarding elements to be appreciated,“part of movie” occupies the highestpercentage60.9%while “movie as a whole” takes14.0%and “other things” take25.2%.Within the24elements of “part of movie”, character (21.0%), plot (18.6), actor’s/actress’performance (10.3%), sequence (6.5%), setting (5.6%) and actor/actress (5.6%) generallyreceived much more attention than others.A majority of elements to be appreciated are prominently evaluated from the perspectiveof IMPACT and QUALITY, while VALUATION plays an important role in evaluatingactor’s/actress’ performance, cinematography, Movie’s-title, stage-properties, scene,screenplay, storytelling, theme, visual-effects.Thirdly, regarding APPRECIATION realization, INSCRIBED (87.29%) overtly andsubstantially outweighs INVOKED (12.71%) in English movie reviews, within whichPROVOKE (10.37%) and AFFORD (1.76%) are the prominent implicit means in expressingAPPRECIATION resources in English movie reviews.Fourthly, regarding APPRECIATION position, English movie reviews published onNYT show a positive position, which can be drawn from the distribution of the position ofAPPRECIATION: the positive (64.17%) far outweighs the negative (35.83%).Finally, regarding the distribution pattern of APPRECIATION across generic structure ofEnglish movie reviews, IMPACT resources and QUALITY resources occupy a majority (bothbeing above66%) of APPRECIATION resources at the four stages of English movie reviews.In Introduction stage and Conclusion stage, the movie tends to be evaluated as a whole; inPlot description stage, plot and characters received relatively more attention than otherAPPRECIATION elements to be appreciated concerning the movie under review; inEvaluation stage, character, plot, movie as a whole and actor’s/actress’ performance are thefour elements to be appreciated that are frequently evaluated. In each stage, most of the APPRECIATION resources were expressed in an INSCRIBED way, while PROVOKE andAFFORD are the two prominent INVOKED way. All the four stages show positive attitude.The present study can typically extend applications of Appraisal theory and proves thefeasibility of Appraisal theory in movie reviews genre. Meanwhile, it can inspire and facilitatethe reading and writing of English movie reviews, which in turn effectively deepen thecomprehension of English movies. Most importantly, it will benefit us in deeplyunderstanding the customs and values in western countries which might drive English learnersand cross-cultural researchers to reach a profound comprehension of English.