Study On The Attitudinal Meaning Of Standards For Being A Good Student And Child In The Light Of Appraisal Theory

Standards for Being a Good Student and Child is derived from Analects of Confucius1, Book 1, Chapter 6, which discusses the basic philosophy and ethics for person to follow, including how to be filial to their parents, respect for teachers, and the way one gets along with people and self-cultivation scholarship etc. And it also becomes the standards of right and wrong, good and evil, beauty and ugliness for people to balance. The famous scholar Professor Qian Wenzhong has once advocated: “Learning Standards for Being a Good Student and Child is important for people to get a knowledge of Chinese culture and then become more civilized.” Recently with the appeal of traditional culture, the book comes back to people’s view again and numerous scholars have joined in the study of the book. Generally speaking, these researches are limited to the analysis from the perspective of ideological connotation on the content of the book, but ignore the systemic linguistic analysis on the book from the perspective of the vocabulary level. This thesis focuses on the study of the vocabularies which are evaluative and try to explore how the emotional factors are conveyed to influence the potential readers. Through detailed analysis, we hope that we can establish an alliance with the readers and make them realize the importance of learning the rules so as to become a more moral person.Appraisal Theory is put forward by Martin in 1990 s, which is an extension of interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Grammar by Halliday. It aims to explore Appraisal resources in the discourse and investigate how language users convey their attitude and viewpoint through evaluation and establish interpersonal relationship. There are three sub-systems in Appraisal Theory: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation in which Attitude is the center of the theory. Attitude can also be divided into three sub-categories: Affect, Judgment and Appreciation.This thesis will make a detailed analysis of the attitudinal resources in Standards for Being a Good Student and Child under the theoretical framework of Attitude system. The book states seven basic moral principles and standards which remind us of being a virtuous people continuously. So it is bound to make evaluations on these principles in order to guide people moving towards the right direction. To achieve its communicative purpose, a lot of Appraisal resources are used to express attitude in the book. In this thesis, attitudinal resources are collected to investigate how these resources influence and resonate to readers and how attitudinal meaning is realized through Attitude values.Qualitative and quantitative methods are both adopted in this thesis, qualitative methods is the focus. On the one hand, we will make an analysis on the attitudinal resources to further reveal the attitude toward the norms and rules; on the other hand, we compare the proportion of different Appraisal resources with the total number that appears in the book in order to show their frequencies and make an analysis.Through the study, it is found that there are many attitudinal resources in Standards for Being a Good Student and Child. The three sub-systems of Attitude can all be found. The percentage of Affect resources is the highest in chapter one and they produce strong emotional power on readers and make them feel that they should be filial to their parents. Judgment resources take up the highest percentage in the whole text of the book. They express the attitude towards the people with noble or bad character and their behavior, either condemn or praise, criticize or admire. This indicates that the book emphasizes more behaviors and personalities of a person. As for Appreciation resources, they show up in every chapter. They occur more times in chapter three, chapter four and chapter seven. Those resources make an objective evaluation on the norms or phenomenon mentioned in the three chapters and make people realize how to distinguish between right and wrong so as to set up good behavior standards.In sum, the application of Attitude System of Appraisal Theory to analyze attitudinal meanings in Standards for Being a Good Student and Child is feasible to some extent and it is a field which needs further exploring.