6.2.3 Analysing Personal Recounts with Appraisal T...
What the SFL grammatical analysis provided here is the experiential and interpersonal construal of disciplinary events in time.Experiential meaning foregrounded a propositional field of reality and was featured in the processes of disciplinary participation.Interpersonal meaning in terms of attitudinal recourses was identified and explained by Appraisal theory, because it is perhaps the most systematic approach offering ‘a typology of evaluative recourses’ (Hyland, 2005, p.174).In this study, the appraised field of discipline was interpreted at a more generalised level.As discussed in Section 4.5, due to the language translation issue of the original personal recounts in Chinese, it was not reliable enough to conduct a detailed grammatical analysis on the textual structure of translated texts.But the equivalence of meaning in translation can be realised by lexis.That was why I only looked at the lexical items representing the processes of disciplinary action such as ‘read’, ‘write’, ‘conduct’, ‘search for’, as well as the generalised participants such as ‘textbook’, ‘essay’, ‘learning’, or ‘material’.
To present data, the appraisal resources were in bold and underlined.The inscribed and invoked appraisal items were identified from positive and negative Attitude and Graduation.The below abbreviations were used in the presenting of data by following Martin and White (2005):
+ ‘positive attitude’
- ‘negative attitude’
sat ‘affect:(dis)satisfaction’
norm ‘judgement:normality’
cap ‘judgement:capacity’
ten ‘judgement:tenacity’
prop ‘judgement:propriety’
reac ‘appreciation:reaction’
comp ‘appreciation:composition’
val ‘appreciation:valuation’
pro ‘engagement:proclaim’
conj ‘engagement:conjunction’
ent ‘engagement:entertain’
The configured experiential and interpersonal meanings at this level then contributed to an elaboration and refinement of possible disciplinary selves, and at the same time presupposed the contextual information for exploring disciplinary identities construction in Chapter 7.
In Appraisal theory, key semantic variables are Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation.They consist of a multi-dimensional system which incorporates the expression of values, the attribution of values to whom, and the scales of values, respectively.The model of Appraisal theory in Figure 6.1 is adopted from Martin and Rose (2007).The curly brackets represent optional meaning potential, while the square brackets represent either/or meaning choices.
Figure 6.1 A grammatical model of Appraisal theory (from Martin & Rose, 2007)
Attitude is realised in explicit or implicit semantic regions of emotion, ethics and aesthetics.Categories of Attitude are Affect, Judgement and Appreciation, which encode positive or negative values to be graded up or down.Figure 6.2 demonstrates that the delicacy principle in SFL is also applied in the system networks of these three attitudinal subcategories, so that any of its options in the movement from left to right can be selected for attitudinal analysis.First, Affect is related to positive and negative feelings or emotions towards phenomena, like happy or sad, feared or confident.It is realised through mental process of reaction (e.g., I like chocolate), attributive relationals (e.g., She is frightened of spiders), or ideational metaphor of nouns (e.g., Her happiness was obvious to all).Second, Judgement is concerned with ethical evaluations of character and behaviour that address social esteem or social sanction.Like Affect, Judgement has positive and negative values achieved by adverbials (e.g., honestly, stupidly, fairly), attributes and epithets (e.g., that was dishonest, a skillful actress, don’t be cruel), nominals (e.g., a hero, a brutal tyrant, a genius), or verbs (e.g., to triumph, to deceive, to sin).Third, Appreciation deals with aesthetic evaluation of semiotic or natural processes or entities.It has three categories:reaction (e.g., arresting, lovely, horrible, ugly), composition (e.g., simple, spacious, complex, cramped), and valuation (e.g., meaningful, profound, shallow, reductive) with either positive or negative states.
Figure 6.2 Subcategories of Attitude
Attitude is graded up or down by the system of Graduation whereby instances amplify feelings or blur semantic categories.Two senses in Graduation address the grading of attitudinal meanings to be intensified or compared.The first is that of Force, which deals with the degree of intensity of processes and quantities for ‘turning up the volume’ (Martin, 2000, p.148).Grading the Force of Attitude involves three aspects, as in the following examples:
intensity-constructed as a quality:slightly, a bit, somewhat, rather, really, very, completely
quantity-constructed as a thing to measure quantity, extent, and proximity in time and space:small, large; a few, many; near, far
enhancement-constructed lexical item(s) infused with theideational process of meaning:the temperature plunged, prices skyrocketed, they’ve axed the entire accounting division, the storm cut a swathe through …
The second one is that of Focus, which is realised in the sharpening or softening of semantic category boundaries, as valeur.The expressions of Focus tend to associate with the concepts of ‘hedging’ and ‘vague language’, such as price skyrocketed or real happiness.Lexical words ‘skyrocketed’ and ‘happiness’ interestingly function as material or psychological categories, rather than addressed feelings.
Identification of appraisal resources may be either ‘directly construed in text, or implicated through the selection of ideational meaning which redound with affectual meaning’ (Martin, 2000, p.155).In expressing the explicit or ‘inscribed’ (Martin, 1997) Attitude, the direct lexical coding of Affect, Judgement and Appreciation can be identified as exemplified above.As with evoking attitudinal resources, the realisation of Attitude is possibly found in metaphoric phrases such as tears were falling down, which may indicate the effect of sadness.However, the assessment of evoked Attitude also depends on the subjectivity of the interpreter or the particular context of situation; as such, the phenomenon of tears were falling down could happen at a joyful moment.One way to identify evoked attitudinal meaning is in the double layering of Judgement and Appreciation, as Martin and White (2005) state, ‘which take us out of our everyday common sense world into the uncommon sense worlds of shared community values’ (p.45).