Paper
Appraisal Theory
Published Apr 27, 2015 · DOI · P. White
421
Citations
31
Influential Citations
Abstract
The appraisal framework, developed by Martin and White and their colleagues in the 1990s and 2000s (see, for example, Iedema, Feez, & White, 1993; Martin & White, 2005), provides for analyses of those meanings by which texts convey positive or negative assessments, by which the intensity or directness of such attitudinal utterances is strengthened or weakened and by which speakers/writers engage dialogistically with prior speakers or with potential respondents to the current proposition. These meaningmaking resources are grouped together as the “language of evaluation” on the grounds that they are all means by which the speaker’s/writer’s personal, evaluative involvement in the text is revealed as they adopt stances either toward phenomena (the entities, happenings, or states of affairs being construed by the text) or toward metaphenomena (propositions about these entities, happenings, and states of affairs). Early work on the appraisal framework largely focused on evaluative meanings in English, with this literature noting that no assumptions should be made as to whether the evaluative categories proposed for English necessarily operate in other languages. Subsequently, researchers have employed the descriptive principles that underlie the framework in work on other languages and in work that compares and contrasts evaluative meanings across languages (see, for example, Thomson & White, 2008). The view of language adopted by the architects of the appraisal framework is that of the systemic functional linguistic theory of Halliday and his associates (Halliday, 1994). Accordingly they hold that meaning-making can usefully be divided into three broad modes, or what Halliday terms “metafunctions”: (1) “ideational” meaning by which language construes the world of experience, (2) “interpersonal” meaning by which speakers/writers enact social roles, personas, and relationships, and (3) “textual” meaning by which these ideational and interpersonal meanings are organized into coherent texts appropriate for a given communicative setting. The evaluative meanings described by the appraisal framework provide some of the mechanisms by which the “interpersonal” metafunction operates, in that they present speakers/writers as revealing their feelings, tastes, and opinions with greater or lesser degrees of intensity and directness, as construing propositions as more or as less contentious or warrantable, and as thereby aligning or disaligning with value positions in play in the current communicative context. Within the model of the interpersonal metafunction proposed by Martin (1997) these resources of “appraisal” operate alongside two other interpersonal systems: those communicative resources by which speakers/writers perform speech functions such as asserting, questioning, responding, commanding, advising, and offering,
The appraisal framework analyzes evaluative meanings in texts, revealing the speaker's/writer's personal involvement and involvement in the text, and demonstrates their impact across languages.
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