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Attitudinal Meanings in Love of Life from the Perspective of Appraisal Theory

Author: WuYan
Tutor: LiuZuo
School: Nanchang University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: appraisal theory attitudinal meanings Love of Life
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Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 192
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Abstract

This thesis analyzes the attitudinal meanings in the short story Love of Life by American writer Jack London by using the framework of appraisal system in Systemic Functional Linguistics so as to reveal how linguistic elements realize the attitudinal meanings in Jack London’s Love of Life.Appraisal theory is a development of Systemic Functional Linguistics, which takes "system" as the "core" and "appraisal" as the "system". It was firstly proposed by J.R. Martin and his colleagues in 1990s. In the past, theorist liked to analyze language from the perspective of grammar. But Appraisal theory tends to analyze language from the perspective of lexis. It is a great change and improvement in the study of language.This thesis studies the attitudinal resources in the short story Love of Life by American writer Jack London in order to figure out the attitudinal meanings in this short story, and how the authors employed the attitudinal resources to interact with the story and its readers. Attitude can be further divided into Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. So this thesis will be analyzed in terms of Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. What’s more, Affect resources will be analyzed from the perspective of three sub-systems:Affect as "quality", Affect as "process" and Affect as "comment"; Judgment resources will be analyzed in terms of social esteem and social sanction; Appreciation resources will be classified into positive and negative appreciation.In this thesis, not only quantitative analysis is of importance, but also qualitative analysis cannot be neglected. On one hand, a quantitative analysis will be employed. The words, phrases and few small clauses expressing attitude will be identified in the light of the sub-systems of attitude. On the other hand, a qualitative analysis will be employed. The frequencies of different attitudinal resources are accounted for to find possible significance that is related to the author’s writing purposes or writing styles.This thesis includes five chapters. Chapter One is to introduce some basic background, research questions, research significance, methodology and organization and its significance. Chapter Two reviews the previous researches on Appraisal theory, and reviews the previous researches on Jack London and his works including Love of Life. Chapter Three gives a detailed introduction about attitudinal systems. Chapter Four is the main body of the thesis and is concerned with the detailed analysis of the story in terms of Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. In this chapter, detailed statistics of their frequency are made and crucial examples are chosen from the story so as to analyze their attitudinal meanings and to prove the feasibility of Appraisal theory in analyzing English language of short stories. Chapter Five sums up the major findings limitations of the research and its implication.According to the study, on one hand, we can find Appraisal theory can be applied to analyze English short stories. There are rich attitudinal resources in the story Love of Life. According to preliminary statistics,10.8%of the words in the story indicate attitudinal meanings, in which 41.4%are appreciation resources,32.7% judgment resources and 25.9%affect resources. Rich attitudinal resources help to build interpersonal relationship between readers and the author. Appreciation resources take up the highest percentage. In this way, Jack London managed to describe a northern wasteland where hunger, coldness and danger were all around the corner. As for judgment resources, they express Jack London’s attitude towards human beings and their behaviors, either condemn or praise, either criticize or admire. The percentage of affect resources is the lowest among these three resources, but they play an important role in the story. They produce strong emotional power on readers and make them feel the hero’s dedication to life. On the other hand, researchers pay less attention to Jack London’s short stories than to his novels. So the thesis can get Jack London’s short story better known to researchers and readers, like his humorous writing style, his favorite themes, common features of his works, social background as well as cultural beliefs in that society. It fills the gap between readers and the author.In brief, the application of the Appraisal theory to analyze attitudinal meanings in a short story is to some degree feasible and it is a field which needs further exploring.

Attitudinal Meanings in Love of Life from the Perspective of Appraisal Theory

Abstract

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