A Study Of The Interaction Of Explicit And Implicit Evaluation Based On Appraisal Corpus

Appraisal System is an extension of the study of interpersonal meaning within Systematic Functional Linguistics,and it is a horizontal and vertical extension of the interpersonal meaning.Martin and other scholars incorporated vocabulary research into discourse semantics and proposed the Appraisal System.The attitude system is the core of the whole system,which includes affect,judgment and appreciation.The evaluative meaning of discourse can be divided into two types,namely explicit evaluation and implicit evaluation.Explicit evaluation is mainly reflected by attitudinal words.In addition to vocabulary,people's external behavior,metaphor and ideational meaning can also trigger the evaluative meanings in discourse,that is,the implicit evaluation.So far,many scholars at home and abroad have studied and proved the feasibility of employing linguistic Appraisal System in the field of discourse analysis.But most of these studies are focused on explicit evaluation and few researches are done from the perspective of ideational meaning.By taking the Attitude System of the Appraisal System as the theoretical framework,the story Love of Life is selected in this thesis as the material to retrieve the explicit evaluative resources by using the Chinese-English Parallel Corpus of Appraisal Meanings(CEPCAM)and UAM Corpus Tool is used for statistical analysis.According to the theoretical description of implicit attitudinal meaning,a descriptive study is made in this thesis on the implicit attitude resources on the grammatical level.And by analyzing the distribution of explicit and implicit attitude resources in different categories,this thesis aims to summarize the grammatical manifestation of the implicit evaluation and the interactive relationship between the explicit and implicit evaluation in attitude categories and polarity(positive and negative).The major findings are as follows.Firstly,the implicit evaluative meaning in the selected material is triggered by the ideational meaning.Because most of the descriptions in the story are reflected by the characters' behavior and environment,the meaning of implicit evaluation is mainly reflected in the transitive structure on the grammatical level,and mainly in the material,mental and relational processes.Secondly,the attitudinal meaning in discourse can be triggered,and the three categories of explicit attitudinal meaning in linguistic Appraisal Theory may be changed in the triggered evaluation,especially between the adjacent categories.Thirdly,the explicit evaluation in the discourse and the evaluation they trigger may not be consistent in polarity.But no matter whether the polarity is consistent or not,the explicit evaluation will always guide or promote the implicit one,and it does not pose an obstacle to the semantic expression and story theme.It can be seen that in addition to the explicit evaluation,the implicit one is often used to express the attitudinal meaning in literary discourse,and the explicit evaluative meaning and implicit one are complementary on the level of meaning expression.Therefore,the present study proves the importance of the interaction of the explicit and implicit evaluation in the field of literary discourse analysis.The interaction between the explicit and implicit evaluation makes the language resources more abundant and the language expression more flexible.People can recognize the implicit evaluation so as to correctly understand the true meaning that the author wants to express and better grasp the theme of the story.In addition,the study of the interaction of explicit and implicit evaluative meanings can better reflect the coordination of the ideational meaning and interpersonal meaning in discourse,and help to improve the theoretical framework and formal categorization of the linguistic Appraisal System.