A Study of Appraisal System and Its Texture/Textuality Mechanisms

Abstract

Language, as a social symbol, functions to express world experiences, construct social role relationships, and choose words and sentences to organize discourse. The interaction between language meta-functions is a problem deserved studying. From the perspective of textual meta-function, this paper tries to discuss the mechanisms of organizing Appraisal system as a texture, and construct a rather comprehensive analysis framework of the textual devices for evaluation meaning as a whole text. The framework built consists of three strata (contextual, discourse-semantic, and lexico-grammatical), two dimensions (micro and macro), and an intermediary variable (rhetorical strategies). At the contextual stratum, the generic structure of genre and mode of register, through rhetorical strategies, determine the distribution and combination patterns of evaluative meaning at the discourse-semantic stratum. In micro dimension, cohesion, information distribution pattern, and evaluative prosody, together with theme, new information and logical semantic relations in macro dimension, are combined to organize evaluation meaning at the discourse-semantic stratum. At the lexico-grammatical stratum, Appraisal meaning is thus embodied and realized by the evaluative lexical chains, thematic structures, new information structures, connectives and meta-discourse markers at the discourse-semantic level of a text. This framework reflects the interactions between the interpersonal meta-function and textual meta-function of Appraisal system and provides insights for the development of Appraisal Theory.