The Multimodal Analysis Of Attitudinal Meaning

Appraisal Theory is a development and extension of the interpersonal meaning within the Systemic Functional Linguistics.Martin and White claim that linguistic study should further analyze the appraisal meaning of the speaker through the discourse semantics instead of restricting itself to the structure and function.Appraisal Theory has been widely applied to analyze mangy types of text including news,column,social editorial,teaching and translation.These studies have provided evidence for the proposition that Appraisal Theory has emerged as an effective means for the analysis of the appraisal meaning.However,few studies are concerned with the construction of the appraisal meaning from the perspective of multimodality.Within the multimodal discourse such factors as sound,facial expressions and gestures are the important sources for constructing the appraisal meaning.From the perspective of cognitive appraisal and cognitive psychology the thesis aims to explore the two nominees’ attitudinal meaning constructed by speech,facial expressions and gestures in the third televised presidential debate in 2016 based on the Attitude system of the Appraisal Theory proposed by Martin and White,the Appraisal-emotion Model proposed by Roseman(2001)as well as the semantic and pragmatic synchrony between speech and gestures put forward by McNeill(1992).Thus the study investigates the multimodal construction of the attitudinal meaning.The thesis combines the quantitative and qualitative approaches to conduct the research.It tests the values of the eight emotions including sadness,neutral,disgust,anger,surprise,fear and happiness through Emotion API which is professional in facial expressions test.In addition it annotates the gestures used by the two nominees through ELAN,an annotation tool.In the process of investigating the attitudinal meaning constructed by speech and facial expressions the author classifies the 14 targeted cases following the standard whether the emotions manifested in the face correspond to the appraisal process.In the process of exploring the attitudinal meaning constructed by speech and gestures the author classifies the 14 targeted cases based on the criterion whether the gesture synchronizes with the speech semantically or pragmatically or both.The results are stated as follows:when the emotions manifested in the face correspond to the appraisal process the attitudinal meaning constructed by speech and gesture is enhanced,otherwise it is undermined.When the emotions and the appraisal process jointly create an ironic effect the attitudinal meaning is enhanced too.When the gestures maintain semantic or pragmatic synchrony or both with the speech the attitudinal meaning constructed by speech and gesture is enhanced,otherwise,it is undermined.