A Comparative Study Of Attitudinal Resources In The Prefaces Of Chinese And English Linguistics Monographs In Light Of Appraisal Theory

Book preface is an independent academic genre at the beginning of a book,providing effective and useful information for readers.Meanwhile,it assists authors and publishers to promote books.Appraisal Theory(AT)is an important extension of interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL),proposed by J.Martin and White in the 1990 s.It is composed of 3 systems: attitude,engagement and graduation,in which attitude is the core domain to present evaluations.Abundant researches are carried out in areas of law discourse,educational discourse,media discourse,political discourse,etc at home and abroad.However,little attention has been paid to studies on book preface from perspective of AT.This thesis is designed to conduct a comparative analysis of attitudinal resources in the prefaces of Chinese and English linguistics monographs under the guidance of attitude system in AT.Both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted to calculate realizations and distributions of attitudinal resources with the help of UAM Corpus Tool.10 Chinese and 10 English prefaces in applied linguistics are chosen as data.Each preface is calculated and annotated based on attitude system in UAM.Three research questions are raised as follows:(1)How are attitudinal resources realized in the prefaces of Chinese and English linguistics monographs?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the distributions of attitudinal resources in the Chinese and English linguistics monographs?(3)What are the possible causes for the similarities and differences in the realization and distribution of attitudinal resources in the Chinese and English linguistics monographs?After detailed analysis of data,there are some salient findings.First,in terms of means to realization,attitudinal resources in Chinese and English are generally realized by means of adjectives,nouns,verbs and adverbs.Adjective is most frequently employed in both Chinese and English as it bears the function of defining properties.However,Chinese writers tend to use verb form more frequently whereas English writers often use more nouns.Second,with regard to similarities and differences in distributions,there are no outstanding differences in the data at the macro level.Appreciation resources take the prominent position while affect is the least employed to keep objectivity.At the micro level,affect system displays similar trend in terms of polarity and explicitness.Positive and explicit affects are preferred.In judgement system,writers pay much attention to evaluation of capacity.Only a small number of veracity resources are employed.In addition,there are more normality and positive resources in Chinese than those in English.As for appreciation,valuation takes the largest portion whereas reaction is the least employed.Composition resources occupy a larger proportion in Chinese.In general,polarity and explicitness of appreciation in Chinese and English show similar trend.It indicates writers’ overall optimistic evaluation of things.Third,based on the realizations and distributions,possible causes for similarities and differences in the data are concluded.Firstly,the promotional and informative features of book prefaces determine writers’ consistent preference for applying attitudinal resources both in Chinese and English so as to introduce and promote books to readers.In addition,different language features of Chinese and English potentially lead to diverse characteristics of the means to realize attitudinal resources.Verb form is preferred by Chinese writers while English contain more noun-form expressions.At last,cultural typology may have an influence on diverse distributions of attitudinal resources.The subjectivity-oriented Chinese culture and objectivity-oriented English culture contributes to the differences of polarity of attitudinal resources to some extent.The comparative analysis of book preface under the framework of AT proves that AT is an effective method to analyze the genre of book prefaces and hopefully,this study can provide enlightenment to academic evaluation and communication with book prefaces.Although great efforts have been made,there are still limitations in this study.Only 20 book prefaces restricted to applied linguistics are selected as the data.This thesis only employs attitude system as the primary theoretical framework.In future studies,researches on more prefaces in other fields in other sub-systems are advocated.