An Appraisal Analysis On Generic Structure Of English Movie Reviews

With the rapid development of information technology, more and more attention is paid to film industry. Movie reviews, as an essential part of the film industry, are exerting their growing influence. Movie reviews can not only introduce movies for audiences, but also convey reviewers’ attitudes towards movies, thus audiences can decide whether one movie is deserved to be watched. Therefore, movie reviews are persuasive and appraisal resources in them are of great research value. This thesis,with Appraisal theory and Generic Structure Potential as theoretical framework, will explore the relationship between generic structure and appraisal resources, as well as how the distribution of appraisal resources changes in different stages of movie reviews.Appraisal theory was proposed by Jim Martin and Peter White in 1990 s and it was built up on the basis of Systemic Functional Grammar. The author applies Generic Structure Potential proposed by Hasan in 1980 s. In recent years, with the improvement of Appraisal theory, researchers have done a lot of studies on it, such as researches about the scholar discourse, law discourse and football comments, etc.However, there are few researchers employing Appraisal theory in studying movie reviews, let alone combining it with Generic Structure Potential. This thesis is going to analyze appraisal resources in 25 English movie reviews, which are selected from the professional film critics website http://www.ofcs.org/, with Generic Structure Potential as the theoretical framework. Finally, a conclusion will be drawn about the distribution of appraisal resources in different stages of movie reviews.Through careful analysis, the following results are reached. Firstly, in the stage of Introduction, Plot and Evaluation of English movie reviews, the frequency of Attitude outweighs Engagement and the reason is that reviewers apply as much Appreciation and Judgement resources as possible to make their reviews more objective. Secondly, of three sub-types of Attitude, in the stage of Introduction and Evaluation, Appreciation is adopted most, Affect the least and Judgement in between,while in Plot, Judgement takes the highest frequency, then Appreciation and Affect theleast. The reason is that in the stage of Introduction and Evaluation, reviewers employ more Appreciation resources to improve the objectivity of reviews and win more readers. However, in the stage of Plot, it is necessary to judge behaviors of characters,thus Judgement resources are more adopted. In all these three stages, reviewers use the fewest Affect resources to decease the subjectivity of texts. Thirdly, as to Engagement, in each stage of Introduction, Plot and Evaluation, dialogic contraction far outnumbers dialogic expansion. In dialogic contraction, Disclaim resources are used most in order to highlight reviewers’ authority and in dialogic expansion reviewers apply more Entertain resources to align with more readers.It can be inferred from the above results that the distribution of appraisal resources has close relationship with communicative goals and generic structure of movie reviews.