An Analysis Of The English Film Reviews From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

The present study is a study about the English film reviews from theperspective of Appraisal Theory. Appraisal Theory, which is put forwardby Martin and White in1990s in Australia, is a development of SystemicFunctional Grammar. There are three sub-systems under the AppraisalTheory: attitude, engagement and graduation.As the Appraisal Theory has been developed for about20years, thelinguists have employed the Appraisal Theory to analyze different genresof discourse. By selecting30film reviews from some famous English andAmerican newspapers, including New York Times, Los Angels Times, TheGuardian and The Daily Telegram, the author of the study makes a smallcorpus. After a careful analysis of the appraisal resources in the30English film reviews, the author will find the distribution of differentappraisal resources and explore the reasons for these features. The authorhopes that the present study will be beneficial for us to treat film reviewsmore rationally and help the English learners in their writing skills.After some careful analyses, the author arrives at the followingconclusions: First, all the three sub-systems of the Appraisal Theory arenegotiated in English film reviews. In terms of Attitude system, theauthor finds that the affect resources account for the smallest part in thefilm reviews, the resources of appreciation are the largest, and theresources of judgment lie in between. The reason for this linguistic feature in the English film reviews is that the film reviewers are trying tobe more objective so that their reviews are more persuasive andconvincing.In terms of Engagement system, the author finds that the resources ofdisclaim take up a large part. This is due to the fact that film reviewersuse a lot of concessive words in their reviews. However, film reviewersemploy a lot of locutions of entertain, aiming at leaving some space forother voice to establish a harmonious relationship with the readers.In terms of Graduation system, resources of force take up a large partin film reviews, while resources of focus are drastically fewer. Besides,intensification and quantification, the sub-categories of force are oftenemployed to modify attitudinal resources, especially the appreciationresources, which take the largest part among the three sub-categories ofattitude system. Meanwhile, the graduation resources used to modifyengagement resources are not so many and not so noticeable as that tomodify attitudinal resources.On the whole, the present study is not only a new test to the AppraisalTheory but also shed light on the film reviews study.