A Study Of Movie Review Discourse From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

As a sort of evaluation discourse which is tightly related to movie, movie review has a significant research value and has been attracting more and more attention. On the one hand, movie review can be used to express the attitude and feeling to the movie, movie plot and characters by reviewers. On the other hand, by reading others' movie reviews, readers can understand and appreciate the content of the movie and judge whether the movie is worth watching or not. In addition, the movie review aims to analyze and evaluate the social significance and aesthetic value of the movie, thus it plays a significant role in broadening the horizons and improving the works of movie director. Although there are numerous movie reviewers in our country, the quality of the current movie reviews is not invariably favorable and a great deal of movie reviews can not fully realize their evaluation value. By analyzing the use of evaluation resources in movie reviews from the perspective of Appraisal Theory, this thesis aims to produce help to the writing of reviewers.Appraisal Theory is derived from the study of interpersonal meaning of the Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL). It includes three sub-systems: Attitude,Engagement and Graduation with Attitude serving as the core. Attitude has to do with linguistic resources which convey the speakers/writers' subjective assessments and values towards human behavior, text/process, phenomenon. Engagement is used to describe those meanings which in various ways construe for the text a heteroglossic backdrop of prior utterances, alternative viewpoints and anticipated responses.Graduation is used to express the rank hierarchy of Attitude. This thesis intends to analyze the resources of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation distributing in the movie reviews of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of Appraisal Theory.The selected 20 movie reviews of this thesis which are published by American mainstream media come from the review column in the websites of http://www.mrqe.com/ and http://www.rottentomato.com/. In order to guarantee the effectiveness and objectivity of this study, the author employs both quantitative research and qualitative research. By using quantitative research, the author extractsthe evaluation resources in the selected 20 movie reviews on the basis of the three sub-systems of Appraisal Theory, then the author classifies and counts these evaluation resources by using statistical method. By using qualitative research, the author analyzes the statistical data to obtain the distribution characteristics of all kinds of evaluation resources, then analyzes the causes for this distribution characteristics from the perspective of interpersonal meaning.This thesis includes six chapters: Chapter One emphatically introduces background of the study, significance of the study, objectives of the study and framework of the study. Chapter Two mainly introduces the studies to the movie review discourse and Appraisal Theory explored by domestic and foreign scholars.Chapter Three introduces the framework of Appraisal Theory. Chapter Four mainly presents research questions, the corpus, research procedures and research methods.Chapter Five analyzes the evaluation resources of the selected corpus by using both quantitative research and qualitative research. Chapter Six summarizes the research findings and indicates the deficiencies of this study, then gives some suggestions to the research in the future.This study finds that:(1) Attitude, Engagement and Graduation resources exist in the selected movie reviews, however, there are considerable differences in their respective distribution frequency, among which Attitude resources take up 45.1%,Engagement resources take up 20.3%, Graduation resources take up 34.6%.(2) In Attitude sub-system, in order to ensure the objectivity of movie review, appreciation resources take up the largest proportion, while affect resources take up the smallest proportion, the proportion of judgment resources is intermediate.(3) In Engagement sub-system, the proportion of dialogic contraction resources which are more likely to build the authority voice of reviewers outnumber the proportion of dialogic expansion resources.(4) In Graduation sub-system, the proportion of force resources distinctly surpass the proportion of focus resources, because the majority of Attitude and Engagement resources are gradable.