A study of “Attitude” in English restaurant reviews from the perspective of appraisal theory

Abstract

Appraisal Theory is a framework developed by James Martin and Peter White in the 1990s which was based on the theoretical model of systemic functional linguistics. The appraisal system in this theory is a functional model that functions at the discourse semantic level, with a focusing on interpersonal meaning. The purpose of this paper aims to find out the language of “Affect”, “Judgement” and “Appreciation” in the category “Attitude” used in English restaurant reviews in terms of syntactic features and semantic features. The findings reveal that the semantic features, the positive evaluative Attitudes reflected in the samples outweigh the negative values. In terms of the syntactic features, Adjective Groups and Nominal Groups are more frequently used than Verbal Groups, Adverbial Groups and Prepositional Phrases. On the basis of the finding, the article provides basic knowledge about the evaluative discourse and to some extent enables them to interpret a discourse.