An Analysis Of The Attitude Resources In Chinese Impromptu Sports Commentaries

In the1990s, Martin and his colleagues proposed a new theory, the Appraisal Theory,which is also called the Appraisal Systems. As an extension of the Systemic FunctionalLinguistics, it mainly covers the evaluative resources in texts, including the evaluativeresources adopted by speakers/writers, and the methods employed by speakers/writers tonegotiate interpersonal meaning with the actual and potential respondents. The AppraisalSystems can be classified into three sub-systems, i.e. attitude, engagement and graduation.Moreover, the attitude comprises affect, judgment and appreciation.As China becomes increasingly stronger in politics, economy, sports, and so on, peopleall around the country are crazy about sports, especially after the Beijing Olympic Games.Meanwhile, professional sports channels sprout out and attract many eyes. So the Chineseimpromptu sports commentaries (CISC) are becoming more and more important for thesignificant role it plays when people watch the matches. The commentators should give anobjective description about what is happening on the court on the one hand; they may addpersonal feelings, analyses, predictions and subjective opinions towards the players, teams,coaches, judges, etc on the other hand. Consequently, the commentaries are a rich repertoireof attitude resources, which, however, has not received the deserved linguistic attention.This research is an attempt to explore the attitude resources in the sports commentariesfrom the perspective of Appraisal Theory. The overall aims of the present study are to figureout what attitude resources exist in sports commentary, what are the general features of theattitude resources, and what functions the attitude resources have.The research is carried out following certain steps. First, according to online videos,6table tennis matches, including the men’s singles finals and women’s singles finals in2000,2004, and2008Olympic Games, are chosen and transcribed as the the text corpus. Second,the attitude resources in the corpus are identified and tagged, and then classified according tothe three sub-systems of the Appraisal Theory. Relevant data is collected and presented intables. Accordingly, both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed to make theanalysis.The findings of the research present that affect, judgment and appreciation resourcesexist in the CISC. And proximity, a type of attitude resources beyond the Appraisal Theory isalso discovered. Besides, three general features of the attitude resources in CISC arediscovered, i.e. distribution features, source features and loading features. Moreover, thefunctions of attitude resources in CISC are also figured out in the study.The research is a tentative attempt to apply the Appraisal Theory to the analysis of the CISC, so it demonstrates its great feasibility in dealing with various genres or sub-genres.Besides the findings of the study can provides the commentators with some implicationsabout improving their comments, so as to better serve the television audience.