Session 6 Flashcards
(18 cards)
How can evaluations in the Appraisalsystem be expressed?
- In different ways
- With different levels of engagement
- With different degrees of force
What are the three subcategories of Attitude?
- Affect (characterizes phenomena by referring to emotions)
- Judgement (evaluation of human behavior with respect to social norms)
- Appreciation (the evaluation of objects rather than human behavior by reference to aesthetic principles and other systems of value).
What are the features of the subcategory affect?
- Affect is about expressing emotions.
- It is typically realized through the depiction of:
- Mental processes
- Rational attributive processes (I’m sad etc.)
- Ideational metaphors - Values of affect are either positive or negative categories (Sad - Happy etc.)
What are the features of the subcategory judgement?
- Judgement is about language which criticizes or praises the behaviour - the actions, sayings, beliefs, motivations etc. - of human individuals and groups by reference to some set of special norms.
What can we judge behavior as?
- Moral or Immoral
- Legal or Illegal
- Socially acceptable or unacceptable
- Worthy of praise or Deplorable
- Normal or Abnormal
What are typical realizations of Judgement?
- Adverbials (Justly, honestly etc.)
- Attributes (corrupt, brave etc.)
- Nominals (tyrant, hero, genius)
- Verbs (to cheat, to sin, to jolly)
What are characteristics of the subcategory Appreciation?
- Appreciation is about evaluating objects and events.
- aesthetically (e.g. a beautiful sunset)
- and socially (e.g. a boring presentation) - Typical realizations:
- Focus on compositional qualities of entity
- Focus on reaction - Usually evaluates objects, texts and more abstract constructs but can also be used to evaluate humans when they are viewed more as entities than as participants.
How do we express Polarity in Appraisal?
- Is the evaluation positive or negative?
- All subtypes of attitude can have negative or positive polarity (Come up with examples)
- Positive feelings which are grammatically negated do not equal negative feelings. (She doesn’t love her vs. She hates her).
What questions can we ask ourselves when analyzing Attitude?
- Is the writer using a lot of attitude resources or only a few?
- Is the writer using a mix of affect, judgement and evaluation? Or is the writer mostly using one?
- Why would the author be focused on feelings or judging people, or evaluating a thing?
- Is the writer typically using positive or negative attitude resources?
- Why is he making these language choices?
In which parts of an academic text do we expect to find which types of attitude?
What is the control question for the subcategory affect?
Can i feel the expressed emotion?
Which types of attitude are expected in academic texts?
- All forms of attitude are used in good academic texts, but there is a strong preference for appreciation and implicit judgement.
- Less Affect than other Appraisal resources.
- Judgement: Often applied to other researcher’s work and expressed implicitly.
- Appreciation is used most often but the evaluation is of more abstract things like systems, theories or methods.
What does Graduation part of the interpersonal metafunction do?
Graduation increases or decreases the force of a statement.
What are typical realizations of Graduation?
- Choosing a stronger or weaker lexical item.
- Repetition (Not necessiraly lexical repetition)
- Quantification
What is graded?
We can grade statements but often we grade attitude or engagement resources
What has a low or high degree in Attitude?
Who is the Appraiser and who is the Appraised?
- Appraiser: Who is doing the appraising?
- Appraised: Who or what is the target of the Appraisal?
Why do Attitude and Graduation matter?
- Attitude describes how we choose to express opinions, emotions, judgements, evaluations and so on.
- Graduation describes how strongly we express those.
- Even subtle or implicit language choices can have a powerful influence on your audience
- Thinking about who/what/what group of people is being appraised and how can help us critically examine the texts we encounter and be less susceptible to underlying biases/messages.
