An Appraisal Analysis On Raymond Carver’s Collection Of Short Stories

Raymond Carver is a famous novelist and a poet in the U.S in the20th Century.Carver’s works attracts many critics and scholars, and lots of researches are conducted.Most of these researches are about the stylistic feature of “minimalist”, however,researches from systemic-functional perspective are rare. The collection What We TalkWhen We Talk about Love consists of seventeen pieces of short stories, and it is his mostrepresentative works. The Appraisal Theory was firstly put forward by J.R. Martin. It isa development of M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Linguistics. It is “a particularapproach to exploring, describing and explaining the way language is used to evaluate,to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positioningand relationships(White,2001b)”. The present study analyzes the collection from theappraisal perspective. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted, and allseventeen pieces in the collection serve as the corpus. Based on the Appraisal Theory,the present study aims at analyzing the distributions of appraisal resources, finding outhow appraisal resources work to build the characters, meanwhile, to figure out howappraisal resources influence Carver’s writing style.The major findings are shown as follows.(1) Under attitude, judgment resourcestake43.65%, followed sequentially by affect (35.54%) and appreciation (20.81%).Meanwhile, negative attitude resources take55.74%, which are more than positive ones.Under engagement, dialogic contraction takes81.85%, among which negation (deny)resources take51.28%. In terms of graduation, force takes86.67%, meanwhile,up-scale resources take70.1%.(2) The distributions of appraisal resources suggest thatthe mode of discourse is gloomy. The characters in the stories all come from the bottomof the society; their life are unhappy and they struggle to live.(3) Carver uses very fewappraisal resources as the “author’s voice”. He does not engage his own attitude into thetexts and he distances himself from the texts; therefore, the texts are objective. Readers,however, are easily aligned with the texts. For Carver, his dictions are precise and cold,but for the readers, they get immense space to imagine.