| Movie reviews, as a genre of discourse, are the comments made on the movie in essence and have the functions of introduction, evaluation, persuasion and attraction. More and more linguists have shifted their attention to this genre of discourse from different perspectives. On the other hand, the Appraisal Theory is also a newly developed theory which mainly focuses on the theme of negotiation and evaluation. The Appraisal Theory has been adopted to analyze various genres of discourse in linguistics, such as journalistic discourse, juridical discourse, e-mail discourse, academic writing discourse, conflict discourse and so forth. However, there are few researches concerning the appraisal resources in English movie reviews. In this respect, the author intends to analyze the collected movie reviews based on the Appraisal Theory.The present study collects 50 pieces of movie reviews which are written by professional English-speaking movie critics to establish a corpus. Aiming to find the distribution of each appraisal resource in English movie reviews, the present study analyzes each piece of data from the aspect of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation and their subtypes. Based on the different distribution of each appraisal resource, the thesis then gives a discussion on the reasons for the difference. In addition, general features of this genre of discourse are also explored based on the distribution.Analytical findings from the present study have shown that each subcategory of Appraisal Theory---Attitude, Engagement and Graduation--- is involved in English movie reviews. Under the category of Attitude, Appreciation is the dominant resource to be applied (57.8%), followed by Judgment (36.6%) and Affect (5.5%). That can be contributed to the fact that among the three attitudinal resources, Affect tends to contain more subjective feelings, while Appreciation is relatively more objective. The main aim of the movie review is communication and persuasion, and the review can have a better effect on readers if it appears more objective. As to the category of Affect, Non-authorial Affect (54.9%) is more frequently used than Authorial Affect (45.1%), which is also due to objectivity and validity. In the category of Judgment, directors and actors are often assessed from the aspect of Capacity, while the characters in the movie are often appraised from the subcategory of Propriety. Different focal points lead to this difference. Critics pay attention to the performance of the actors rather than the ethics, while characters in the movie is the other way round. In Appreciation, the distribution of Reaction (49.0%) and Valuation (39.7%) far outnumber Composition (11.3%). This is caused by the function of the review which is to give readers their opinions about the movie rather than describe the complexity and balance of the movie. With regard to the category of Engagement, Disclaim is the most frequently used resource (61.80%), followed by Entertain (20.42%), Proclaim (16.98%) and Attribute (0.80%). As to the category of Graduation, Intensification (50.6%) and Quantification (40.3%) are dominant compared to Sharpen (4.2%) and Soften (4.9%).When it comes to the features of the movie review, subjectivity is the most noticeable characteristic. In the next place, the main puipose of the movie review is to communicate, which shows the interpersonal function of language. Last but not least, English movie reviews mainly belong to a discourse of dialogistic contraction. |
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