A Study Of The Use Of Appraisal Resources In The Literature Review Of English Majors’ Master Theses

As important academic resources,English Majors’ Master Theses not only convey the author’s point of view,but also demonstrate academic competence.In a master thesis,the literature review section aims to review the main results of the field and is one of the important components of a master thesis.In the writing process,the proper use of appraisal resources appropriately express the author’s attitude and opinion as well as mastery of the relevant field.This thesis analyzes the types of appraisal resources used in the literature review section of Chinese master’s theses in English and the frequency of use,and explores what kind of evaluative functions are realized by the master theses’ authors.This thesis is framed by J.R.Martin’s appraisal theory,which is a lexical-level extension and supplement made by J.R.Martin(2004).It is based on the study of interpersonal functions in systemic functional linguistics.Appraisal theory focuses on the discourse resources that indicate the author’s attitude,position and opinion,and appraisal resources mainly contain attitude resources,engagement resources and graduation resources.This study attempts to answer the following three research questions:(1)What are types of appraisal resources used by English-major postgraduates in literature review of English major master’ s theses ?(2)What are the distributional features and frequency of appraisal resources in literature review of English-major postgraduates’ theses?(3)What are the evaluative functions of appraisal resources in literature review of English major postgraduates’ theses?This thesis adopts the self-built corpus,using Chinese English-major postgraduates’ theses in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics major and English Language and Literature major from key universities as research subjects.50 theses from 2020-2022 are selected from CNKI,and the literature review part is extracted accordingly.The data are retrieved and counted through Ant Conc3.5.9 software based on J.R.Martin’ appraisal theory.The quantitative analysis explored the general use and the distributional features of appraisal resources,the qualitative analysis analyzed what evaluative function appraisal resources realize.The study find that: Firstly,the literature review part of the thesis of English majors involves a large number of attitude resources,engagement resources and graduation resources.Secondly,in terms of frequency and distribution characteristics,attitude resources occupy the highest proportion,accounting for 63.20%,followed by engagement resources,accounting for20.04%,and graduation resources account for the least,resulting in 16.46%;Thirdly,by using appraisal resources,Chinese English-major postgraduates in English have implemented evaluative functions for content such as opinions mentioned in the literature,expressing sentiments such as negative,positive,agreeable,neutral and more.This study broadens the application of appraisal theory to the literature review part and expands the scope of research on the evaluative function of appraisal resources.In addition,this study is also helpful for teaching and writing of the English literature review section.