An appraisal analysis of judgement values on a Chinese political web forum

Abstract

This paper reports on an appraisal analysis of a representative sample of 32 posts, and associated comments, on a Chinese political web forum, which is a first attempt to critically apply the appraisal framework to this context. One of the key findings is that the Chinese contributors to this forum judged the behaviour of others by relying to a great extent on assumed references and cultural knowledge. This ‘insider’ knowledge, in particular the perceived social status of the target group, is realised using different kinds of appraisal resources, mostly of the invoked type, with some of these resources different to those commonly used by native English speakers in similar contexts. The use of such resources enabled contributors to express negative judgement of people they perceived to be in the elite, as well as towards other nation-states. In this paper, we identify status-sensitive linguistic resources that invoke attitudes in this context, and thus propose to split the appraisal category of judgement: social sanction: propriety into ethics-based propriety and social-hierarchy-based propriety. We discuss how these resources are deployed by the contributors to position others in ways that depend on both knowledge of cultural context and the online communicative context in which these interactions take place.