Systemic Functional Linguistics as Interpersonal Semantics: Appraisal and Attitude in the Stylistic Analysis of an English Novel

Abstract

Subsumed under Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) that emphasizes functionality of language in social contexts, Appraisal is a recent theoretical framework that extends the interpersonal dialogistic semantics dimension of SFL into interesting elaboration. This system, in turn, has three subsystems, one of which is Attitude which is geared to justifying and explaining the processes through which writers and speakers communicate their evaluations towards individuals, material objects and phenomena, or even their own emotions. Since Appraisal has evolved in recent years, studies have often been concerned with introducing the framework, and extensive attention could obviously not have been paid to tapping into the practical, and equally, enormous use of this system in illuminating and insightful discourse analysis. This study is a small step in such a direction. The selected corpus for this research was "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the whole novel was analyzed discursively, linguistically, and stylistically through one of the subsystems of Appraisal, namely Attitude. Two research questions at the macro level were concerned with the analysis of the whole text (the whole novel) employing Attitude. Two other research questions at the micro level were concerned with the analysis of the discourse of each of the main discourse producers (main characters of the novel) when employing Attitude. The data

Evaluating Attitudes in News Text: Appraisal in Critical Discourse Study

“…This study has given new information that appraisal can also be conducted on news item different from the other researches to show the kinds of affect to urge the world to pay attention to the kinds of feeling felt by the marginal sides (Palestinian). It also supports the statements stated by Wei,Wherrity, and Zhang (2015) as one of the proofs that appraisal is an appropriate tool to analyze the attitude and interpersonal meanings both in discourse like what have been conducted by Dong (2006); Pascual and Unger (2010); Isaac (2012); Hadidi and Parvin (2015); Drasovean and Tagg (2015) and in critical discourse conducted by Haristyanti (2015) on Obama's speech.…”

“…A large number of researches have conducted a study on appraisal and there is still a gap found. Dong (2006) investigated appraisal on students' writing in blog; Pascual and Unger (2010) focused on appraisal in proposals which got international grant; Isaac (2012) analyzed arguments of ten international non native speaker who uses English for academic purposes by using appraisal theory; Hadidi and Parvin (2015) conducted a study on appraisal in novel; Wei,Wherrity, and Zhang (2015) reviewed appraisal theory from the current research in China and abroad; Haristyanti (2015) saw appraisal used by Barack Obama in his speech; Drasovean and Tagg (2015) studied on online participants' comments. The study on appraisal by analyzing newspaper online in religion context in critical discourse analysis has not been done and it becomes the gap of the study.…”

Affect in Expressive Speech Acts by the Judges of the Voice Uk Versus the Voice Vietnam

“…Apart from that, Appraisal Theory was applied in the research of childbirth narratives (Page, 2003), high-and lowrated English argumentative essays by EFL students in two Chinese universities (Liu, 2013), English song discourses (Li, 2016), critical reading in teaching English at colleges (Ruo-mei, 2016), English novel discourse (Hadidi & Mohammadbagheri-Parvin, 2015) or President Xi's remarks at the press conference (Zhang, 2018).…”

The Application of Stylistic Analysis in College English Teaching

“…Michael summarizes stylistic analysis as three interrelated steps: description, explanation and evaluation [4]. According to the structure of language, descriptive methods are divided into phonetic level, lexical level, semantic level, syntactic level and discourse level.…”