An Appraisal Approach To The Attitudinal Stance In English Book Reviews Of Applied Linguistics

As an academic genre,the book review functions to give information and evaluations of academic books and plays an important role in academic communication.This thesis is based on the attitude system of appraisal and it randomly selects sixty English book reviews of applied linguistics as samples and uses the UAM Corpus Tool 3.0 to annotate the corpus.It discusses the generic features of English academic book reviews of applied linguistics and conducts a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the reviews to explore the distribution of attitudinal stance and the evaluative strategies to give some implications for the study and writing of reviews.This study divides reviews into three parts,namely,Introduction,Overview and Evaluation.It is found that there are more attitudinal resources in Evaluation than in Introduction and Overview in English academic book reviews of applied linguistics.In addition,appreciation resources account for the largest proportion in each part,followed by judgment and affect.In terms of sources of attitude,it is discovered that attitudes from reviewers play a dominant role in reviews.And reviewers are more inclined to refer to more positive attitudes from famous scholars to enhance the values of these reviewed books in Introduction of reviews.In terms of objects of attitude,attitudes in each part are mainly used to evaluate content of books,followed by readership,book authors and style.The findings of the study can help readers learn the distribution of different attitudinal resources of reviews and help them learn how reviewers adopt these evaluative resources to make their evaluations more objective and persuasive.On the other hand,it can provide a theoretical support for the book review researchers and writers.