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An Analysis of the Little Prince from the Perspective of Appraisal Theory

Author: XiongYanRu
Tutor: XiongSuChun
School: Nanchang University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: appraisal theory The Little Prince attitude engagement graduation
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Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 374
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Abstract

As one of the most famous writer in the 20th century, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s masterpiece The Little Prince has received wide prestige since its publication. It has created a great miracle because the reading amount of The Little Prince in the worldwide ranks only in the second place to The Bible. Antoine de Saint-Exupery once wrote a sentence in the preface:"I ask the indulgence of the children who may read this book for dedicating it to a grown-up". The desire of the freedom that the writer has described is in accordance to the thirst for freedom of the readers, which has greatly promoted the success of The Little Prince.The Little Prince tells a moving and attractive story:the little prince left his planet because of his anger with the rose. Then he started his intergalactic travel and finally he arrived the Earth where "has a good reputation". Here he met a pilot who was trapped in the desert Sahara, and put forward many doubts with his childish language. Later he made friends with a fox who was considered a very important character in this book. In his world, there were a snake, sheep, baobabs and his rose. He also met a lot of odd "grown-ups" during his travel on the other planets. Antoine de Saint-Exupery describes many thought-provoking stories from the viewpoint of a little boy. But how the author successfully realizes his intention through the words is expected to be worked out as well as the distribution of the appraisal resourcesIn fact, appraisal theory derives from the interpersonal metafunction of Systematic Functional Linguists which is brought up by M.A.K. Halliday. The appraisal theory is the development of Systematic Functional Linguists. Appraisal is regionalized as three interacting domains:attitude, engagement and graduation.Attitude deals with the feelings which include emotional reactions, judgments of behavior and evaluation of things. It is also categorized into three regions of feeling: affect, judgment and appreciation. As the center of attitude system, effectual inscription invokes judgement and appreciation. In other words, language users adopt affect, judgement and appreciation to describe the target things. As Martin has stated, they are alternative resources to register feelings, praise or condemn the behavior and evaluate the natural phenomena.Broadly speaking, engagement is concerned with the ways in which resources such as projection, modality, polarity, concession and various comment adverbials position the speaker/writer with respect to the value position by quoting or reporting, acknowledging a possibility, denying, countering, and affirming etc.Graduation refers to grade phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred. And it has two domains:force and focus. Graduation has to do with adjusting the degree of an evaluation—how strong or weak the feeling is. which is called "force" graduation. While in the context of non-gradable resources graduation has the effect of adjusting the strength of boundaries between categories, construing core and peripheral types of things. This system is called "focus". We are going to categorize and find out the appraisal resources to work out how the author realizes his writing purposes and transfers the attitude in The Little Prince.This thesis is an attempt to help the readers understand the great tale story from a new perspective. Quantitative and qualitative methodology which is combined with detailed instances has been adopted to investigate the distribution of the appraisal resources and the realization of these functions.In this thesis, four major findings have been worked out:Firstly, through the analysis, we find that although this is the first attempt of the application of appraisal theory in analyzing The Little Prince, it is very pragmatic in conducting researches in literary works.Secondly, the analysis has indicated that the author has adopted high frequency of attitude resources in this book.Thirdly, as for engagement resources, there are also many engagement resources in this book. It can be found in The Little Prince. And the amount of employment of heterogloss outweighs the amount of monogloss.Last but not least, it is concluded the author prefers to use force resources and high intensity words to raise the attitude rather than soften words to lower the attitude.

An Analysis of the Little Prince from the Perspective of Appraisal Theory

Abstract

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