| Appraisal Theory, or AT for short, was advanced and developed by Professor J.R.Martin, an Australian Linguist, in the 1990s. It concerns with how language is used by writers/speakers to approve and disapprove, to evaluate, to adopt stances, and to manage interpersonal positions and relationships. AT consists of three sub-systems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Attitude is the core of the theory. This thesis attempts to explore the attitudinal resources in online film reviews in light of Appraisal Theory.Nowadays, the Internet has not only reconfigured people's ways of life. It has, indeed, become a "forum" by which people express their ideas and attitudes. Online reviews serve as a good case in point as Internet makes it possible for ordinary people to freely rate and review films and TV productions. Online reviews also provide people with guidance in their entertainment consumption. Online reviews have gained so great a popularity in recent years as to become a noteworthy cultural phenomenon with its specific media attributes. This thesis chooses American political television drama series House of Cards for case study, with which to formulate a contrastive study between Chinese and American online reviews.By selecting 50 online reviews in English (with user location in the United States) from Internet Movie Database, or IMDb for short, and 50 in Chinese on Douban.com, this thesis forms a corpus to facilitate the attempt for contrastive analysis. Adopting the methodology of both qualitative and quantitative analysis, the thesis tries to explore the characteristics of the attitudinal resources, study how the different kinds of attitudinal resources are employed, and to explain the reasons for their distribution in both Chinese and American online reviews.This thesis has six chapters. Specifics follow:Chapter One is the introductory part, which covers the background of the study, the objectives, the research questions and the thesis organization. Chapter Two reviews previous studies accomplished by Chinese and foreign scholars in relevant fields, which covers the studies of cross-cultural readings of American TV dramas, online reviews of film and TV programs, studies of House of Cards, along with the studies of AT. Chapter Three presents the theoretical framework for this thesis by providing a brief introduction to AT and a detailed explanation of the Attitude System. Chapter Four deals with the methodology, including an introduction to the analytical tool UAM Corpus Tool and the analytical procedures. Chapter Five is the main part of this thesis. The attitudinal resources of the 100 collected Chinese and American online reviews of House of Cards are analyzed in detail, with further comparisons and discussions. Chapter Six is the conclusive part.This thesis has come up with the following results:both in total and on average, the attitudinal resources in Chinese online reviews are much fewer than in American online reviews. The Appreciation resources are most frequently adopted by the reviewers from the two countries, indicating that aesthetical evaluation takes the most important part. Judgement resources are adopted more in China than in the U.S., in both proportional and quantitative terms. This indicates that Chinese reviewers are more likely to relate the drama with morality than Americans. The Affect resources, characterized by a strongest relation with personal emotional expression, are less frequently adopted by Chinese reviewers. This difference indicates that American viewers have a stronger tendency to express personal feelings than Chinese viewers. In terms of the mode of attitude, most of the attitudinal resources in the online reviews in both Chinese and English, are "inscribed" but not "invoked", which means that the reviewers are more likely to express their personal attitude explicitly. And in this case study, a majority of the online reviewers hold positive attitude toward House of Cards in both China and the U.S.Based on the above contrastive analysis, this thesis gives a cross-cultural reading of the results. The different distribution of attitudinal resources mirrors the different cultural identities of the two nations. The similarities however, reflect the influence of the rising network society on different culture. |
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