MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
UNIVERSITY OF DANANG

LÊ THỊ VÂN HỒNG

AN INVESTIGATION
INTO THE SUB-CATEGORIES OF “ATTITUDE”
IN THE BOOK THE WORLD IS FLAT
BY THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF APPRAISAL THEORY

MASTER THESIS IN SOCIAL SCIENCES
AND HUMANITIES

Danang, 2015


MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
UNIVERSITY OF DANANG

LÊ THỊ VÂN HỒNG

AN INVESTIGATION
INTO THE SUB-CATEGORIES OF “ATTITUDE”
IN THE BOOK THE WORLD IS FLAT
BY THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF APPRAISAL THEORY

FIELD: THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
CODE: 60.22.02.01


the realizations of Attitude sub-categories in terms of syntax and semantics to
obtain the setting goals. The finding of the research demonstrate that Attitude
sub-categories can be recognized in various group and phrase structures in
which nominal groups and adjective groups are more favourable. The study
also works out typical functions of Attitude sub-categories as components in
transitivity processes. Semantically, the findings show that all Appraisal
evaluating criteria were reflected in the book and significantly the positive
values are dominant. This is the interpersonal meaning which the book
contributes to nurture its readers’ insights to the reality of the world in the era
of digital technology. The study makes a significant contribution to our
understanding of the sub-categories of Attitude in the book and provides the
teachers and university students majoring in English with practical
implication to evaluate a discourse fragment and interpret a discourse
fragment in the light of Appraisal Theory and in line with Systemic
Functional Linguistics.


iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
MASTER THESIS IN SOCIAL SCIENCES.....................................................................................1
MASTER THESIS IN SOCIAL SCIENCES.....................................................................................2

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP...............................................................i
ABSTRACT ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS.............................................................................iii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS........................................................................v
LIST OF TABLES.........................................................................................v
LIST OF FIGURES.....................................................................................vii
[15] Ju, C.Z (2008), “Appraisal Analysis Of Political Editorials In

Ri
Rq

The World Is Flat
Systemic Functional Linguistic
Systemic Functional Grammar
Negative attitude
Positive attitude
Appreciation: reaction-impact
Appreciation: reaction-quality

LIST OF TABLES
Table 2.1. Judgement - Social Esteem.........................................................21


vi

Table 2.2. Judgement - Social Sanction.......................................................21
Table 2.3. Types of Appreciation.................................................................24
Table 2.4. Typical functions of group and phrase classes..........................29
Table 2.5. The principle categories of ‘relational’ clause..........................31
Table 4.1. Summary structures of Affect adverbial groups......................59
Table 4.2. Summary structures of Appreciation adjectival groups..........82
Table 4.3. Summary of group and phrase structures of Attitude subcategories

85

Table 4.4. Distribution of group and phrase structures in Attitude subcategories

86

Figure 2.11. Nominal group, showing multivariate structure...................35
Figure 2.12. Experiential structure of the verbal group............................36
Figure 2.13. Verbal group with marked polarity and contrastive tense. .36
c. Adverbial Groups......................................................................................36
Figure 2.16. Adjectival group.......................................................................37
Figure 4.1. Affect verbal groups as Process in Desiderative mental
process

47

Figure 4.2. Affect verbal groups as Process in Emotive mental process. .47
Figure 4.3. Affect verbal groups as Process in passive Material process. 47
Figure 4.3. Summary structures of Affect nominal groups.......................50
Figure 4.4. Affect nominal groups as Possessed in Possessive relational
process

51

Figure 4.5. Affect nominal groups as Goal in Material process................52
Figure 4.6. Affect nominal groups as Existent in Existential process.......52


viii

Figure 4.7. Affect nominal groups as Attributor in Existential process...53
Figure 4.8. Summary structures of Affect adjectival groups....................57
Figure 4.9. Affect adjectival groups as Attributes in Attributive relational
processes

58

in Relational process.....................................................................................79
Figure 4.27. Appreciation nominal clauses as Identifier in Existential
process

79

Figure 4.28. Apprepriate nominal clauses as Goal in Material process...80
Figure 4.29. The occurrence frequencies of Attitude sub-categories.......86
Article I.


1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION
1.1. RATIONALE
In the current era of information and technology explosion, geographical
distances and hierarchical grades between nations seem not to be the matter.
This results from the integration and globalization in every aspect of social
life such as economy, politics, culture, education, etc. The globalization
process is happening drastically and may be advancing at a faster rate than
ever before. Globalization itself brings about opportunities as well as
challenges. Many countries, governmental organizations and individuals can
take advantage of a wide variety of opportunities opened by the worldwide
advance of science, technology to facilitate their prosperity and development.
The digital-technology advance has made the face of the world change a lot.
A new world where the worldwide cooperative relationships are fostered has
been being nurtured. In this situation, every country, even the most developed
one, is facing plenty of competitive challenges which require necessary

decades and the changes in international cooperation and integration. It
provides beneficial update information of the real situation of the world in
globalization and integration process.
The newest edition of TWF was published in August, 2007 by Picador
Publishing House. In this new edition, Friedman, T.L. included fresh stories
and insights to help us understand the flattening of the world. He added two
new chapters on how to be activist and social entrepreneur in a flat world and
how to manage our reputations and privacy in a world where we are all
becoming publishers and public figures.
In the book, Friedman, T.L. demystified the brave new world in the


3

phase of globalization. He helped the readers to make sense of the often
bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes with his inimitable
ability to turn complex foreign policy and economic issues into more simple
ones. He exposed his profound and deeply important insights about the
phenomenon in the global context which to some extent help to make the
public conceptual shift about the reality of the world. The book opened a new
door for countries, companies, communities, and individuals to come into a
new domain and suggested the way governments and societies can and must
adapt to achieve their goals. With such significant contributions, the book was
awarded the inaugural Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of
the Year Award in 2005. It also became one of the international best-selling
books in the years 2005 and 2006. In The New York Times reviewing The
World Is Flat in 2005, the Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz remarked "One
mark of a great book is that it makes you see things in a new way, and Mr.
Friedman certainly succeeds in that goal".
In recent years, researching linguistic objectives in the framework of

the overarching framework of systemic functional linguistics by Martin and
White [22]. It refers to the grammatical and lexical resources for expressing
evaluation. The theory is concerned with how text producers construe
particular authorial identities for themselves, how authors align/disalign
themselves with actual or potential respondents and how writers or speakers
construct an ideal audience for their texts.
- Attitude refers to a domain of Appraisal which is concerned with our
feelings including emotional reactions, judgement of behaviour and
evaluation of things. It is divided into three regions of feeling namely Affect,
Judgement, Appreciation.


5

- Affect is an emotive dimension of Attitude which is concerned with
positive and negative feelings.
- Judgement deals with attitudes toward people and the way they
behave which we admire, criticize, praise or condemn.
- Appreciation involves evaluations of semiotic and natural phenomena
according to the ways in which they are valued or not in a given field.
1.3. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
1.3.1. Aims of the Study
The study primarily aims at investigating the syntactic and semantic
realizations of the three sub-categories of Attitude namely Affect, Judgement,
and Appreciation in the book TWF. The findings of the study, then, will
probably help the teachers and university students majoring in English
increase their knowledge about how to evaluate a discourse and to some
extent enable them to interpret a discourse in light of Appraisal Theory.
1.3.2. Objectives of the Study
The study is intended to:

Appraisal Theory with three categories of Attitude, Engagement and
Graduation is an approach which enables to explore, describe and explain the
way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual
personas and to manage interpersonal positioning and relationships.
Therefore, the theory may be potentially employed to study a wide range of
aspects such as linguistic features, application of the theory in teaching and
learning English. However, the thesis is limited in the study of syntactic and
semantic realizations of the three Attitude sub-categories Affect, Judgement
and Appreciation appearing in the book TWF.
1.7. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY
The study is organized into five chapters as followed:
Chapter 1:

Introduction


7

This chapter presents the rationale, the aims and objectives, the scope, the
research questions, the signification as well as the organization of the study.
Chapter 2: Literature Review and Theoretical Background
This chapter consists of two parts. The first one is a review of previous
studies relating to the investigated problem. The second is concerned with
theoretical knowledge related to issues under study.
Chapter 3: Research Methodology
This chapter presents research design, research methodology, data
collection, data analysis and research procedure. It also includes the reliability
and validity of the thesis.
Chapter 4: Findings and Discussion
This chapter is concerned with the work of discovering realizations of

strengthen their identities in a text or a discourse. The function practiced by
appraisal items in a discourse is to help writers or speakers to express their
evaluation, negotiate their relationship with the respondents, and establish
their persona. Appraisal Theory also provides a new approach which operates
the evaluation in a somehow different way from other modals existing before
which mainly dealt with evaluation in relation to propositions and narratives
by Ocha & Schiefflen 1989, Biber& Finnegan 1989, Bybee & Fleischman
1995, Conrad & Biber 2000, Hunston & Thompson 2000a [22, p.38]. With
Appraisal Theory, we move to a range of other educationally significant genre


9

and casual conversation. Most importantly, within the general framework of
SFL, the theory helps to prove an approach to deal with evaluation was
developed in the context of the rich developing descriptions of
phonology/graphology and signing, lexicogrammar, discourse semantics,
register and genre and multimodality. [22, p.40]
Up to now, Appraisal Theory has attracted much attention of many wellknown English scholars. A variety of studies have been conducted in various
fields, some of the most typical of which are Talking with readers: MetaDiscourse as Rhetorical Act by Crismore [3], Evaluation in Texts: Authorial
Stance and the Construction of Discourse by Hunston and Thompson [13]
The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English by Martin and White [22],
and Working with Discourse: Meaning Beyond the Clause by Martin and
Rose [21] etc.. A large number of articles were published to propose, discuss
and clarify the matters within the domain of Appraisal, including Beyond
exchange: Appraisal system in English by Martin [20], Beyond modality and
Hedging: a dialogic view of the language of intersubjective stance by White
[32], Stance and Engagement: a model of instruction in academic discourse
by Hyland [14], Annotating Expressions of Appraisal in English by Read et al
[29], etc. These publications focus on a certain areas of Appraisal such as

in

“Evaluation

and

Engagement

in

Journalistic

Commentary and News Reportage”. The presence and patterning of various
linguistic resources and the comparison across languages are results of the
study. In “Exploring the Dialogism of Academic Discourse: Heteroglossic
Engagement in Medical Research Articles” Fryer [6] indicated a variety of
Engagement resources used the articles and their distributions both across and
within different sections of the articles.
Also, studies on sub-categories of Attitude are in favour of media
discourses. In “Attitudinal Analysis of VOA and BBC News Report in the
Light of Appraisal Theory”, Wang [31] analyzed the attitudinal meaning of
radio news report in VOA and BBC using the Appraisal system with a view


11

to revealing what linguistic elements realizes the Appraisal meaning and
especially what attitudinal value is of frequent occurrence in the two different
types of radio news report. The study came to the conclusion that in the
Attitude system, Affect turns to be the least presentation; implicit Judgement

Vietnamese. Furthermore, Tran Huu Thuan [28] with “A Study of
Appreciation in Football Commentaries in English and Vietnamese”
classified and analyzed commentaries in three subcategories: reaction,
composition, and valuation and helps valuate the beauty of language. Another
latest researcher, Nguyen Thanh Tam [27] adopted the Appraisal Theory of
Judgement in her study “A Study of the Semantic Features of Explicit
Judgements in Political Speeches in American English” to examine the
semantic features of English political speeches. The conclusions of explicit
judgement in view of Epithet, Illocutionary force, social esteem and social
sanction are helpful to English teachers and learners.
To sum up, in the light of Appraisal, a large number of researches have
been conducted in various subfields and on a variety of materials. However,
there have never been any insights into the sub-categories of Attitude
category for a literature discourse fragment in Vietnam for the time being.
An investigation into the Attitude systems of non-fictions like TWF has not
been the focus of any researches. This study is expected to fill in this gap.
2.2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
2.2.1. Systemic Functional Linguistics
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a school of linguistics
developed by Halliday in 1960s [22] . It is a linguistic school which considers
language as a social semiotic system in which language exists and evolves in
constantly changing contexts of human interaction. The term “systemic”
refers to the view regarding language as a network of systems or interrelated
sets of options for making meanings. Additionally, “functional” denotes to the


13

functions that language system has to serve. Language function can be
recognized on the structure and organization of language of all levels.

concerned with negotiating social relations especially the relation between
speaker and hearer. It indicates how people interacting including the feeling
they try to share. In other words, it conveys how language is used to express
judgement and attitudes. This function of language is related to clause as
exchange, which is interpreted as interactive speech roles or communicative
functions. Halliday [10] suggests by means of interpersonal function we are
able to establish and maintain relations with people, to influence their
behaviour, to express our attitude toward what we say and other beings in the
world and to explicit changes in others. Textual megafunction is about the
verbal world, especially the flow of information in a text and it is concerned
with clause as message. Halliday [9, p.97] describes it as the “relevance” or
the enabling function which is concerned with how a text is organized as a
clause through the process of thememasation. Two elements in this process
are Theme and Rheme. The first serves as the point of departure of the
message while the latter is a part to develop the first. Eggins [4, p.275] claims
that the Theme typically contains familiar or given information, namely the
information which has been given somewhere in the text or familiar from the
context. SFG is, thus, a study of meaning construction through system of
lexical-grammar choices that serve functions within social and cultural
contexts.
In the level of discourse semantics, interpersonal meaning covers three
smaller systems: negotiation which focuses on the interactive aspects of
discourse, speech functions and exchange structures, involvement which deals
with non-gradable resources for negotiating tenor relation and appraisal, our
main focus theory.
In the next section, we will further explore some considerable content of
Appraisal theory in the frame of SFL.