A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Romance Film Reviews

Under the increasing pressure of work, more and more people are willing to seek amusement to relax themselves, among which watching films is one of the most popular entertainment. In order to meet people’s demand, films with all kinds spring out. With the increase of films, film reviews are the beacons for people to choose a suitable film and appreciate it. And Internet is the most accessible way to acquire them. Therefore, many film fans prefer online film reviews rather than traditional ways. Among various kinds of films, romance films are the most emotional related to evaluative resources. So we take romance film reviews as data.This thesis makes an attempt to make the comparison of evaluative resource in English and Chinese Romance Film Reviews within the framework of appraisal system. The writers intend to investigate how evaluative resources are employed to express their attitudes or affection towards films and establish the relationship with readers.This thesis chooses 20 pieces of romance film reviews, ten for English Romance Film Reviews and ten for Chinese involved with 2 romance film Gone Girl and Her. Based on the appraisal theory, the contrastive study of English and Chinese Romance Reviews is made from three systems—Affect, Engagement and Graduation to show that how evaluative resources are distributed unevenly in both languages. From the comparative study of English and Chinese Romance Film Reviews, it comes to some similarities and differences due to different cultures and ideologyFor the similarities, both frequencies of attitude and graduation are similar in both English and Chinese Romance Film Reviews. Engagement is a distinct feature with highest percentage among three categories in both languages. Writers of both languages incline to narrow dialogic space by using contraction resources to make alignment with readers. Within Graduation, Force is used more frequently than Focus and often high value words are used to enhance the positive attitude.For the differences, in English Romance Film Reviews, engagement resources take slight advantage over other two while the percentage of engagement resources is much more salient in Chinese Romance Film Reviews.In Attitude, appreciation and affect resources are prominent features with overwhelming accounts in English compared with affect resources in Chinese less involved to express the writer’s attitude.As for graduation, the occurrences of maximization resources in English is more frequent than those in Chinese. In Chinese Romance Film Reviews, quality and number take a large account while maximization is used less frequently. There is no doubt that some similarities and differences exist in both languages. The same genre and similar readership lead to similarities. The different distribution of evaluative resources may result from the cultural background that the writer stands in and ideology that he bears in mind and experiences he have.The use of Appraisal theory to make contrastive of English and Chinese romance film reviews on one hand enriches research angle of film reviews and extends the application field of Appraisal theory on the other hand. The contrastive analysis of English and Chinese romance film reviews will also help film review writers have a better understanding of linguistic feature of romance film reviews to improve their writing.