A Study Of Attitudinal Meanings In The Scarlet Letter From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Appraisal System originated from 1990s, which was developed from the model of interpersonal meaning, initiating a new era in which Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereinafter referred to as SFL) construed evaluative meaning potential at the textual level. Appraisal Theory is a full set of resources using language to express attitudes, which includes three interacting domains—Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Appraisal Theory has been widely employed in various kinds of discourse analysis, such as media discourse, academic discourse, speech discourse, advertising discourse, legal discourse and so on. However, the researches on Appraisal Theory by a major majority of scholars are generally restricted to overt evaluative lexis, and the appraisal meanings triggered by covert markers are often ignored. But it is far from sufficient to rely on lexis to recognize and construe appraisal meanings in literary works. This thesis attempts to probe into the attitudinal meanings in the text realized at the lexical level, syntactic level and textual level, in order to establish a more comprehensive framework for the analysis of appraisal meanings in discourse.Based on Attitude system within the framework of Appraisal Theory, taking Hawthorne’s representative work The Scarlet Letter as research corpus, this thesis attempts to employ both qualitative and quantitative approaches to collect and analyze attitude resources in Hester’s three leaps of feminist consciousness, aiming at exploring the distribution characteristics and realization patterns of attitude resources, thus summarizing the main attitudinal meanings conveyed by the novel as well as the function and role attitude resources play in the novel’s constructing interpersonal meaning. Traditional studies indicate that most appraisal resources are realized at overt lexical level. Nevertheless, through the research on attitudinal meanings in The Scarlet Letter, the author finds that Appraisal Theory at the lexical level can be expanded to syntactic level and textual level. At the lexical level, attitudinal meanings are mainly realized by inscribed evaluative lexis, including adjectives, adverbs, verbs and nominalizations with evaluative meanings, and lexical metaphors in terms of ideational meaning. At the syntactic level, attitudinal meanings can be constructed by specific sentence patterns, such as marked theme, subjunctive mood, emphatic sentence, negation sentence, comparative structure,-ing form of cognitive verbs, etc. At the textual level, the writer’s narrative point-of-view and socio-cultural contexts can also express the writer’s attitudinal meanings.This study is of both theoretical and practical significance. In theory, compared to traditional researches, on the one hand, this thesis not only probes into overt lexical appraisal resources, but also focuses on the function and realization devices of covert appraisal resources. On the other hand, this thesis attempts to broaden the application of Appraisal Theory from single lexical level to syntactic level and textual level, which further facilitates the development of Appraisal Theory and testifies its practicability and explanatory power. In practice, this thesis expounds Hester’s three leaps of feminist consciousness from the perspective of Appraisal Theory, which provides a more theoretical foundation for the study and interpretation of The Scarlet Letter and demonstrates the feasibility of Appraisal Theory serving literary studies as well as contributing to the appreciation and teaching of literary works.