(Luận văn thạc sĩ) THE ATTITUDINAL RESOURCES IN THE FILM KONG SKULL ISLAND BY JORDAN VOGT ROBERTS

ABSTRACT The present study examined sub-categories of Attitude- Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation- expressed in the subtitles of the film “Kong: Skull Island” by Jordan Vogt-Roberts in

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

QUY NHON UNIVERSITY

PHAN THÁI THỊ LỆ THU

THE ATTITUDINAL RESOURCES

IN THE FILM KONG: SKULL ISLAND

BY JORDAN VOGT-ROBERTS

Field: English Linguistics Code: 8.22.02.01

BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO

TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN

PHAN THÁI THỊ LỆ THU

NGHĨA THÁI ĐỘ TRONG

PHIM KONG: ĐẢO ĐẦU LÂU

BỞI JORDAN VOGT-ROBERTS

No other person’s work has been used without due acknowledgement in the thesis

This thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other tertiary institution

Bình Định, September 2019

Phan Thái Thị Lệ Thu

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge my deep indebtedness to all of my teachers who have provided me with useful and interesting lectures, which have helped

me to lay the foundation for this thesis

In particular, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Dr Ngũ Thiện Hùng- my supervisor Without his enthusiastic guidance, helpful advice, and enormous encouragement, this thesis would have been far from being accomplished

I also give special thanks to all of my classmates, M.A students of English course 20th at Quy Nhơn University who gave me their help during the time I studied and conducted my thesis

Finally, I can say that I owe my debt to my whole beloved family for their continuous encouragement and support during the years of my study Without them, I am sure I would not be able to finish my thesis From the bottom of my heart, I have to say many thanks to you for being such a great family and for everything

ABSTRACT

The present study examined sub-categories of Attitude- Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation- expressed in the subtitles of the film “Kong: Skull Island” by Jordan Vogt-Roberts in the light of Appraisal Theory The study aimed to investigate the syntactic and semantic realizations of Attitude sub-categories from over 350 samples collected from the subtitles of the film The thesis employed the descriptive method to fully describe the realizations

of Attitude sub-categories in terms of syntax and semantics to achieve the setting goals The findings of the research demonstrated that Attitude sub-categories could be identified in various group and phrase structures in which nominal groups and adjective groups are more favourable The study also worked out typical functions of Attitude sub-categories as components in transitivity processes Semantically, the findings indicated that all Appraisal evaluating criteria were expressed in the film and significantly the positive values are dominant This is the interpersonal meaning which the film contributes to nurture its viewers’ insights to the reality of the world in the era

of digital technology The study apparently contributes to help us understand the sub-categories of Attitude in the film 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

Fortunately, the relation of life with nature has attracted a lot of attention

of film directors And most of their works gain noticeable achievements

There is such an action, adventure, sci-fi, fantasy film from the set of Kong:

Skull Island by Jordan Vogt-Roberts

The main theme of the film is that scientists, soldiers and adventurers unite to explore a mythical, uncharted island in the Pacific Ocean Cut off from everything they know, they venture into the domain of the mighty Kong, igniting the ultimate battle between man and nature As their mission of discovery soon becomes one of survival, they must fight to escape from a primal world where humanity does not belong

Released in March 2017 with the budget of 185 million USD, Kong:

Skull Island is the first Hollywood film made with most of the scenes in

Vietnam “It’s such a beautiful part of the world I find that people on that side of the world have that general graciousness that we lack here (in the US)”

Vogt-Roberts states and hopes that people will walk out of Kong: Skull Island

wanting to discover Vietnam for themselves It is sincerely believed that the film will have a positive impact on tourism, filming, and a general understanding of how stunning and beautiful the country is

Apart from the film review, Kong: Skull Island with its English subtitles

not only refreshes viewers’ mood and state of mind but also fulfils their further purposes such as improving their English competence It is mentioned that film is an excellent learning and teaching tool It is true that filming plays

an important role in enriching the moviegoers’ languages in use and in helping them build up the attitude about life later

John and Karl (2012) stated that understanding film might be a capacity that was not particularly concerned with film at all, but rather forms part and parcel of a more general ‘senseseeking’ behaviour in humans This, after all, would explain why films appear to be much more broadly and readily comprehensible than, for example, texts written in some particular natural language

Researching linguistic objectives in the framework of Appraisal Theory proposed by Martin and his colleagues has been becoming more and more popular so far To linguistic disciplines such as discourse analysis, applied linguistics and other related fields, this linguistic theory contributes an approach to investigate how speakers or writers express their opinions for things and ideas The theory developing the model of personal meaning within the paradigms of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) helps to further explore the interpersonal meaning of language in the scope of discourse as well as rhetoric and communicative effects by judging the speakers’/writers’ stance and their communication messages in the relation to the hearers/readers Appraisal Theory addresses not only the means by which speakers/writers overtly encode what they present as their own attitudes but also the means by which they more indirectly activate evaluative stance and position the readers/listeners to supply their own assessments These evaluations reveal both speakers’/writers’ feelings and their status or authority

as construed by the text (Hunston, 2000) Therefore, this is a potential approach to discover the attitude, the evaluation as well as the personal meaning a speaker implies in his words

Although there have been several studies using the Appraisal Theory for analyzing the texts in terms of attitudinal aspects, but a study on subtitles in films has not been received much attention from linguistics and researchers This paved the way for the empirical exploration of a broader range of distinguishable modes than previously considered A natural question of the framework for films is raised In this paper, we set out the position of one very common type of films, the ‘action, adventure, sci-fi, fantasy film’, when viewed through the lens offered by the Appraisal resources (Martin & White, 2005) framework

For example:

- We are also pleased to be joined for the fisrt time…

- We are on the brink of an aerial expansion of knowledge about ourselves

and our surrounding and beyond description of comprehension of this time

- The most intelligent inhabitants of that future world won't be man or monkeys That will be machines

- …the land where God did not finish creation It is notorious for the number

of ships and planes that have gone missing there

- There were no tactical precedents

We will see that, on the one hand, many properties of film fall naturally out of the resulting description On the other hand, this view offers a rich site

of integration for some quite distinct but valuable methods for analyzing film

In addition, we shall also see why the continued use of the term ‘filming’ is not only justified but also beneficial, in that it opens up a much needed source

of further constraint when building detailed models of film and its

interpretation Thus, with an action, adventure, sci-fi, fantasy film like Kong: Skull Island, this approach is applicable

A desire to have further insights into what Attitudinal linguistic devices are realized in the film, how they convey the author’s viewpoints and construe the interpersonal meaning has inspired me to develop the research entitled

“The Attitudinal Resources in the Film Kong: Skull Island by Jordan

Vogt-Roberts”

1.2 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

1.2.1 Aims of the study

The study aims at investigating the syntactic and semantic realizations of the three sub-categories of Attitude namely Affect, Judgement, and

Appreciation in the film Kong: Skull Island 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 of films and to some extent enable them to interpret the discourse in light of Appraisal Theory

1.2.2 Objectives of the study

The objecives of the study are to:

+ Identify the different sub-categories of Attitude used in Kong: Skull Island and realize the occurrence frequencies of each type

+ Indicate the syntactic realizations of different sub-categories of

Attitude expressed in Kong: Skull Island

+ Point out the semantic realizations of Attitude sub-types expressed in

Kong: Skull Island

+ Offer some implications in teaching and learning sub-categories of Attitude in English

1.3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

To deal with the aims and objectives mentioned above, this study addresses the following research questions:

1 Which Attitudinal resources are used in Kong: Skull Island and what

is the frequency of occurrence of these resources?

2 What are the syntactic realizations of Affect, Judgement, and

Appreciation as the sub-categories of Attitude in Kong: Skull Island?

3 What are the semantic realizations of the above-mentioned

sub-categories of Attitude in Kong: Skull Island?

1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The thesis, which applies the theory to linguistic research, explores syntactic and semantic realizations of Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation as

Attitude sub-categories in the film Kong: Skull Island The study is expected

to make a certain contribution to both linguistics and pedagogy domains In the aspect of linguistics, the paper may add to a comprehensive understanding

of attitude linguistic devices included in the film Moreover, the result of the research is expected to dedicate to our understanding of language development Pedagogically, it is hoped that the thesis can be a source of reference for those who teach and study English in higher education institutes

1.5 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

Appraisal Theory includes mainly three types: Attitude, Engagement, Graduation, which is an approach to enable researchers to explore, describe and explain the way language used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positioning and relationships

Thus, 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 film Kong: Skull Island

In this thesis, we just focused on the syntactic and semantic features of the linguistic units used to indicate the attitude in the subtitles in the film

Kong: Skull Island In terms of syntax, we examined the structural features of

the four main phrases: verb, noun, adjective and adverb phrases The investigation into the semantics of attitude dealt with affect, judgement and appreciation, the three parts of attitude, which function to modify and limit engagement system and graduation

This study is hoped to provide the Vietnamese learners of English with a better understanding about the motivation of using attitude in filming as well

as the syntactic and semantic features of the linguistic units to express the attitudinal aspects of films

This study is supposed to bring practical benefits to those who are interested in attitude used in films as far as the linguistic realizations and the use of this appraisal tool has been concerned

1.6 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY

The study is organized into five chapters as followed:

This chapter presents the overview of Systemic Functional Grammar, and the theory of Appraisal Besides, previous studies related to the research area are also summarized to indicate a gap in the study

Chapter 3: Research Methodology

This chapter presents research design, research methodology, data collection, data analysis and research procedure

Chapter 4: Findings and Discussion

This chapter is concerned with the work of discovering realizations of

sub-categories of Attitude in Kong: Skull Island in terms of syntax and

semantics Also, the occurrence frequencies of each sub-type are drawn out

Chapter 5: Conclusions and Implications

This chapter presents the conclusions and a summary of major findings, the implications of the study results in teaching and learning English in Vietnam, the limitations of the study and some suggestions for further research related to the study

products The theory is fully presented in one of their typical works: The Language of Evaluation- Appraisal in English, published in 2005 by Palgrave

MacMilan The major interests of Appraisal Theory comprise how speakers/writers express their stance toward the things or events in the world, how they raise their agreement or disagreement with the potential responses from the other readers, and how they set up and reinforce their identities in a text or a discourse The function practiced by appraisal items in a discourse is

to help speakers/writers express their evaluation, negotiate their relationship with the respondents, and establish their persona

Up to now, Appraisal Theory has attracted much attention of many known English scholars whose studies have been conducted in various fields

well-A large number of articles were published to propose, discuss and clarify the matters within the domain of Appraisal These publications focus on certain areas of Appraisal such as metadiscourse, stance, evaluation, and basic concepts of the theory and they provide us an overall picture about the theoretical background of Appraisal in use

Since the Appraisal Theory was developed from Systemic Functional Linguistic by Martin and White, it has been adopted as a new approach to linguistic study and the Appraisal framework has been applied to other areas

Ju (2008) applied the Appraisal theory, particularly the sub-system of Attitude

to analyzing Political Editorials in American Newspaper in “Appraisal Analysis of Political Editorials in American Newspaper” The study found

that the distributions and values of the resources were different in political editorials and all serve for the purpose of political editorials Besides, the study showed that the values of resources might be related to the American cultural background and ideology Moreover, Liu (2010) implied the

Appraisal Theory in her reading teaching for college students in An Application of Appraisal Theory to Teaching College Reading in China The

results showed that teaching reading in Appraisal approach was an important strategy which helped develop students’ critical ability and supply teachers with a new perspective to teach reading

There have been many studies of language, which related to films and the Appraisal Theory In “Multimodal Film Analysis: How films mean” published 2012 by Routledge, John and Karl gave a brief indication of just what they took semiotics to be and how it related to film In particular, they opened up the key semiotic constructs of stratification and discourse This would establish the directions from semiotics that they accepted as well as delineating more clearly some versions of semiotics and its proposed relation

to film that will not be considered

Learners of MA courses in Vietnam have not fully applied this theory in their study “A discourse analysis of film reviews in English and Vietnamese”

by Hien (2011) aimed at identifying the discourse features of film reviews in

English and Vietnamese in terms of their layout, syntactic structures, lexical choices and cohesive devices

Some certain aspects have been employed in other frameworks rather than Appraisal or applied the Appraisal framework to some extent In his MA

thesis, Thuan (2014) with “A Study of Appreciation in Football Commentaries

in English and Vietnamese” classified and analyzed commentaries in three

subcategories: reaction, composition, and valuation and helped valuate the

beauty of language Furthermore, in the thesis of Hanh (2015) “A contrastive analysis of attitudinal values in travel advertisements in English and Vietnamese”, she used evaluative language to point out the attitudinal

meanings in travel advertisements in English and Vietnamese It was concluded from the study that three domains of attitudinal values were used in both languages, but they were not evenly distributed Specifically, the frequency of occurrence of Appreciation was the dominant with the highest proportion in the

two languages Another latest researcher, Tri (2018) with “A contrastive study

of attitudinal resources in comments given by judges in American Idol and Vietnam Idol” investigated Attitudinal resources used in comments given by

judges in American Idol and Vietnam Idol to find out the similarities and differences in the way American and Vietnamese judges showing their attitudes towards the contestants’ performance

Although the former researches based on the sub-systems of Appraisal such as appreciation, affect, judgement… examined many kinds of discourses, few researchers chose them to explore the subtitles in films

The above-mentioned illustrations of Appraisal have been conducted in many kinds of discourses about different aspects such as science and technology, the use of cognitive-behavioral interventions in sports and

literature In other words, there have never been any insights into the categories of Attitude for an action, adventure, sci-fi, fantasy film for the time

sub-being An investigation into the Attitude systems of the film like Kong: Skull Island has not been the focus of any researches This study is expected to fill

in this gap

2.2 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

This part begins with a brief overview of some concepts including Systemic Functional Grammar, Appraisal Theory and the introduction of the related theories, which the thesis based on

2.2.1 Systemic functional linguistics

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a school of linguistics developed by Halliday in the early sixties 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 Moreover, “functional” denotes to the functions that language system has to serve Language function can be recognized on the structure and organization of language of all levels Therefore, Halliday focused on exploring “both how people use language in different contexts and how language is structured for use as a semiotic system” (Eggins, 1994)

To deal with the syntactic forms of language, Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) was introduced Different from traditional grammar_ the way

in which a language is organized, SFG tries to explain and describe the organization of the “meaning-making resources” (Halliday, 2004) we use to express meanings and perform various functions in different contexts and

situations of our daily lives SFG analyzes language as a resource for making meaning from the view point of meaning basing on extensive written or spoken texts Language consists of a set of system which offers the speaker/writer choices in expressing meaning Such choices are made from a set of systems containing structures which allow us unlimited ways of creating meaning and our experience of the world, of text types and socially, culturally bounded situations help us build a schema of these systems SFG encodes three modes of meaning which operate simultaneously in all utterances namely the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual

In terms of semantics, language in SFL takes over three functions called metafunctions namely ideational, interpersonal and textual functions Particularly, interpersonal function is concerned with negotiating social relations especially the relation between speaker and hearer It indicates how people interact including the feeling they attempt to share In other words, it conveys how language is used to express attitudes This function of language relates to clause as exchange, which is interpersonal as interactive speech roles or communicative functions Interpersonal meaning is also defined by (Halliday, 2000) as the strand of meaning produced when we use language to interact with other people to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behaviour, to express our attitude toward what we say and other beings in the world, and to elicit changes in others

In analyzing Interpersonal meaning, Halliday realizes two components in

a clause: Mood and Modality Mood is concerned with Subject and Finite of a

clause and whether the clause is an imperative, declarative or interrogative Subject is a nominal group that the speaker gives responsibility for the validity of the clause while Finite is always the first element of the verbal group which carries the tense and agreement (persona and number) The

remainder of the functions in the clause is called Residue It is made up of Predicator, Compliments, and Adjuncts Predicator is realized by the elements

of verbal group and Adjunct is typically an adverbial group or prepositional phrase Modality is an important system that is used to express the

interpersonal meaning Halliday (1994, p 356) states that modality is “the speaker’s judgement of the probabilities, or obligations involved in what he is saying” Modality is about those words that mark necessity, possibility or impossibility such as should, must, could, probably, maybe, etc Halliday

refers to probability and usuality together as modalization, which he associates with a proposition; he refers to obligation and readiness as modulation, which is associated with proposals

It is this metafunction that is closely related to Appraisal Theory where different kinds of evaluation can be further developed from the premise of Functional Grammar According to Martin and White (2005), interpersonal meaning in Appraisal Theory concerned with how speakers or writers approve

or disapprove, praise or criticism and with how they position the listeners or the readers to view the issues in a certain way They view that with interpersonal meaning, writers/ speakers construe for themselves particular authorial stance, align or disalign themselves actual or potential respondents and also, they construct an audience for their texts The section that follows will deal with Appraisal Theory in detail

2.2.2 Appraisal theory

2.2.2.1 Appraisal theory in line with SFL

Appraisal is a model of evaluation evolved within the general theoretical framework of SFL It is an extension of linguistic theories of Halliday and his colleagues to develop a comprehensive way to analyze evaluation in discourse

by a group of Functional linguists in Sydney in the late 1980s and early 1990s Appraisal is one of the three major discourse semantic resources construing interpersonal meaning According to Martin and White (2005), Appraisal is defined as an approach to exploring, describing and explaining the way language used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual and

to manage interpersonal positioning and relationship

It is located as “an interpersonal system at the level of discourse semantics” (Martin & White, 2005, p 33) Therefore, the Appraisal system offers a functional model of interpersonal meaning at this level describing how social relationships are negotiated through evaluations of self, other and artefacts The Theory of Appraisal comprises of three semantic areas termed Attitude, Engagement and Graduation as shown in Figure 2.1 adapted from (Martin & White, 2005, p 38):

Figure 2.1 An overview of appraisal resources (Martin & White, 2005, p 38)

2.2.2.2 The category of attitude

Attitude is one of sub-systems of Appraisal Theory which refers to “our feelings, including emotional reactions, judgement of behaviours and evaluation of things” (Martin & White, 2005, p 35) The system of meanings

as Attitude is a framework for mapping feeling as they are construed in texts

It is concerned with emotional responses, judgement of human behaviours and evaluation of products and processes

Attitude itself is divided into three sub-categories, namely Affect, Judgement and Appreciation As the basic framework of this study, Attitude and its sub-categories will be further explained in the next section

2.2.3 Attitude as a category encoding attitudinal meaning

As one of the sub-systems of Appraisal, Attitude is a system of meanings involving in three semantic domains traditionally referred to as emotion, ethics and aesthetics Attitude is divided into the sub-types: Affect - expression about the feelings of human beings, Judgement - evaluation about the characters and behaviours of human beings, and Appreciation - assessment with the value of things

2.2.3.1 The sub-category affect

Affect is taken into consideration to be located at the core of the discourse semantic system of Attitude It is referred as resources for expressing feeling or author’s emotion as represented by the texts It evaluates

an entity, a process or a state of affair emotionally Affect is typically realized through various lexical items including:

Verbs of emotion: (e.g You offer pleases me, I hate chocolate.)

Modal adjuncts (e.g Sadly, the government has decided to abandon its

commitment to the comprehensive school system.)

Adjectives of emotion (e.g I am sad you’ve decided to do that.)

Nominalization (e.g His fear was obvious to all.)

Martin and White (2005) suggest six factors that are applicable to categorize Affect They are cultural vibes, emerging emotion, reaction to

specific emotional phenomena and a general mood or undirected mood, the scale of feelings, the intention or reaction

Focusing on those criteria, Martin and White (2005) divide affect emotion groups into four major sets namely un/happiness, in/security, dis/satisfaction and dis/inclination The un/happiness includes “affairs of the heart” which deals with the mood of feelings-sadness, hate, happiness and love The in/security covers emotions concerned with eco-social well-being – anxiety, fear, confidence and trust - in relation to the environment Dis/satisfaction examines our feelings of achievement and frustration in relation to the activity in which we are engaged, including our roles as both participants and spectators Dis/inclination refers to such feelings as desire or fear

Figure 2.2 The affect system and its lexical instanciations

(Martin & White, 2005, p 51)

To sum up, Affect is concerned with positive or negative feelings about people, things, places, happenings, or states of affairs It is a resource by which writers/speakers indicate emotion The next section is going to discuss the second dimension of the Attitude- Judgement, which deals with people’s behaviors and actions

2.2.3.2 The sub-category judgement

Judgement is the domain of meaning which construes our attitude to people or their behaviours (Martin & White, 2005) It covers meaning to evaluate human and human behaviour either positively or negatively by reference to a set of conventional norms Judgement evaluates human behaviours as moral or immoral, legal or illegal, socially acceptable or unacceptable, normal or abnormal, etc It is a sort of language to criticize, praise, condemn or applaud the actions, deeds, beliefs of human individual

or groups

In general terms, Judgement, as Martin and White (2005) view, can be divided into Social Esteem and Social Sanction The former deals with the values formed in social network They show the ways we admire or criticize how unusual someone is - Normality, how capable they are - Capacity and how resolute they are - Tenacity However, Social Sanction refers to the attitudes toward behaviours as praising or condemning values qualified as civic duty or religious observances It is judged with Veracity - how honest a behaviour is, Propriety - how a behaviour is far beyond reproach It can be seen that Judgement is highly restricted by cultural and ideological values

Like Affect, the values of Judgement may be positive or negative The realizations can be illustrated in the tables 2.1 and 2.2 However, the range of

meanings listed is not exhausted and lexical items will vary the attitudinal meanings according to the use context

Table 2.1 Judgement - Social Esteem

lucky, fortunate, charmed,

normal, natural, familiar, ;

cool, stable, predictable,

in, fashionable, avant garde, celebrated, unsung,

unlucky, hapless, crossed, ;

star-odd, peculiar, eccentric, erratic, unpredictable ; dated, daggy, retrograde ; obscure, also-ran

Capacity

How capable?

powerful, vigorous, robust,

sound, healthy, fit,

adult, mature, experienced,

witty, humorous, droll,

insightful, clever, gifted,

balanced, together, sane,

sensible, expert, shrewd,

literate, educated, learned,

competent, accomplished,

successful, productive,

mild, weak, whimpy, unsound, sick, crippled, immature, childish,

helpless, dull, dreary, grave, slow, stupid, thick, flaky, neurotic, insane, nạve, inexpert, foolish, illiterate, uneducated, ignorant, incompetent,

plucky, brave, heroic,

cautious, wary, patient,

careful, thorough, meticulous,

tireless, persevering, resolute,

reliable, dependable,

faithful, loyal, constant,

flexible, adaptable, accommodating,

timid, cowardly, gutless, rash, impatient,

impetuous,

hasty, capricious, reckless,

weak, distracted, despondent,

unreliable, undependable, unfaithful, disloyal,

inconstant,

stubborn, obstinate, wilful,

Table 2.2 Judgement - Social Sanction

truthful, honest, credible,

frank, candid, direct,

discrete, tactful,

dishonest, deceitful, lying, deceptive, manipulative, devious,

good, moral, ethical,

law abiding, fair, just,

sensitive, kind, caring,

unassuming, modest, humble,

polite, respectful, reverent,

altruistic, generous, charitable,

bad, immoral, evil,

corrupt, unfair, unjust,

insensitive, mean, cruel, vain, snobby, arrogant,

rude, discourteous, irreverent,

selfish, greedy, avaricious,

White (2001) shows that in discourse Judgement values can be recognized in such forms as Adverbials, Attribute and Epithet, Nominal and Verbal Hereby are the typical realizations

Adverbial: justly, fairly, virtuously, honestly, pluckily, indefatigably, cleverly, stupidly, eccentrically

Attribute and Epithet: a corrupt politician, a skilful performer, truly eccentric behaviour, that was dishonest, don’t be cruel, she’s very brave Nominal: a brutal tyrant, a cheat and a liar, a hero, a genius, a maverick

Verbal: to cheat, to deceive, to sin, to lust after, to chicken out, to triumph

Besides, Judgement is grammatically realized in the system of modalization By constructing a series of realizations for probability, usuality, and capacity with congruent realizations and pushing through metaphorical

realization toward lexis, modalizations can be related to lexicalized Judgement of all kinds

The previous discussion has indicated that Affect is a resource for indicating emotional feelings while Judgement deals with the evaluation of human behaviors according to the social norms The following section will focus on the third sub-category of Attitudinal resources- Appreciation

2.2.3.3 The sub-category appreciation

Appreciation is the last sub-system of Attitude by which evaluation is made of procedures and processes Martin and Rose (2007, p 24) regard Appreciation as “resources for valuing the worth of things” It deals with things we make, performances we give and also natural phenomena The values may be either aesthetic or non-aesthetic referring to such meanings which are significant and harmful The typical materials to be evaluated may

be natural objects, artificial objects, texts and abstract constructs like plans and policies Even human may also be judged by means of appreciation as entities rather than participants

Martin and White (2005) categorize Appreciation into three sub-types: Reaction, Composition and Valuation

Figure 2.3 The system of appreciation and its lexical instanciations

(Martin & White, 2005, p 56)

Reaction denotes to the evaluation of a product or process in the aspects

of the impact and quality it leaves on the readers, listeners or viewers by the orientation to interpersonal significance

Composition is applied to evaluate a product or process according to its make-up or according to whether it conforms to various conventions of structural organization It is oriented to textual organization and describes the texture of an object in terms of complexity and detail

Under the sub-type Valuation, an object, a product, or a process is evaluated according to a variety of social norms to justify whether it is worthwhile Under social conventions, criteria to evaluate are distinctive between different domains Therefore, the valuation of one field will not be applicable or relevant in another

Like both Affect and Judgement, values of Appreciation have either positive or negative status - good versus bad, exciting versus boring, harmonious versus discordant, etc (Martin, 2000) and these features cover all

of the types The table 2.3 illustrates the realizations of Appreciation categories in detail

sub-Table 2.3 Types of appreciation

remarkable, notable, sensational,

dull, boring, tedious,

dry, ascetic, uninviting, flat, predictable,

okay, fine, good, ;

lovely, beautiful, splendid, ;

appealing, enchanting, welcome, ;

bad, yuk, nasty, ;

plain, ugly, grotesque, ; repulsive, revolting, off-putting, ;

consistent, considered, logical, ; shapely, curvaceous, willowy,

unbalanced, discordant, irregular, uneven, flawed, ; contradictory,

disorganized, ;

shapeless, amorphous, distorted, ;

Composition

Complexity

‘was it hard

to follow?’

simple, pure, elegant, ;

lucid, clear, precise, ;

intricate, rich, detailed, precise, ;

ornate, extravagant, byzantine, ;

arcane, unclear, woolly, ; plain, monolithic, simplistic

derivative, conventional, prosaic, ;

dated, overdue, untimely, ;

‘was it

worthwhile?’

landmark, ; inimitable, exceptional, unique, ;

authentic, real, genuine, ;

valuable, priceless, worthwhile, ; appropriate, helpful, effective,

dime-a-dozen, everyday, common, fake, bogus, glitzy, ;

worthless, shoddy, pricey, ; ineffective, useless, write-off,

Affect, Judgement and Appreciation encode the attitudinal meaning in the domain of Attitude Affect, which can be taken as the heart of this domain, is concerned with emotional responses and dispositions while Judgement focuses on the assessment of human’s behaviours by reference to a set of institutionalized conventions, and Appreciation is about evaluation of things, natural objects, products and processes Taken into consideration in the uncommon sense worlds of shared community value, Judgement and Appreciation may be regarded as institutionalized feelings Judgement deals with feelings in the realm of proposals about behaviours - how we should behave or not Appreciation, on the other hand, reworks feelings as propositions about the value of things - what value they are worth In reality, a lexical item of Affect may be rephrased in Judgement or Appreciation meanings When emotional values towards people’s behaviours are institutionalized, they become Judgement values; otherwise, institutionalization of feelings towards aesthetics and values of “things” becomes appreciation ones The orientation may be outlined in the figure 2.4

Figure 2.4 Judgement and appreciation as institutionalized affect

(Martin & White, 2005, p 45)

In (1), “surprise” functions as Affect which denotes the author’s emotion

to the state of affair However, in (2) “surprising” assesses the students’ behaviour and in (3) evaluates the value of “the role play” So, a lexical item should be judged in the linguistic context to be confirmed the attitudinal values

In conclusion, the Appraisal system is concerned with the linguistic resources by which the speaker/writer can offer a positive or negative assessment of people, things, states of affairs and processes Furthermore, of the three broad domains of the Appraisal system, Attitude is useful to identify

and analyze a speaker/writer’s attitudinal resources, so it can be applicable for

investigating the semantic features of the attitude construed in the Kong: Skull Island

2.2.4 Syntactic realizations of attitude - experimental elements of clause

as representation

Language is a semiotic system which can be realized at three levels of abstraction including phonology and graphology, lexicogrammar, and discourse semantics as illustrated in the figure 2.5

Figure 2.5 Language strata (Martin & White, 2005, p 9)

The most concrete of these, phonology and graphology, deals with the

organization of phonemes into syllables combining with rhythm and intonation

in spoken forms and the combination of letters into words and sentences in writing The second level, lexicogrammar, is concerned with the formation of words and structures in the same mechanism of the previous level The

discourse semantic level which is concerned with the meanings beyond the clause focuses on aspects of discourse organization It is noticeable that the more abstract level in this stratification is the recoding of the patterns of the lower level It is not made up of the lower level patterns, but it is recognized through them

(Martin & White, 2005, p 9)

Located as an interpersonal system at the level of discourse semantic within the general theoretical framework of SFL, syntactic aspects of Appraisal can be realized on the basis of SFG (Martin & White, 2005, p 27)

In SFG, the semantic organization of a clause may be interpreted in three aspects namely Clause as Message, Clause as Exchange and Clause as Representation Clause as Message shows the meaning of a clause in its functions as a message and analyzes the clause itself as a two-part structure with the elements Theme and Rheme Clause as Exchange considers the meaning of a clause in its interactional meaning The language in a clause is organized in this way as Mood and Residue In Clause as Representation, the meaning of a clause is interpreted by the content of the language it includes, which demonstrates what the speaker has experienced or what he wants to reflect In this aspect, the clause is analyzed as Processes through the grammar of the clauses For the sub-system Attitude of Appraisal, which shows the experience of the speakers/writers to the things, Clause as Representation can be applied to judge its realizations Below are some main points of Clause as Representation which is worthy of our consideration

Generally, the framework of a process, as Halliday (2007) points out, consists potentially of three components: (1) Process, (2) Participants in the process and (3) Circumstances associated with the process These components lie behind the grammatical distinction of different word classes which is probably universal among human languages as expressed in Table 2.4 adapted from Halliday (1985, p 102)

Table 2.4 Typical functions of group and phrase classes

Type of element Typically realized by

(1) Process

(2) Participant

(3) Circumstance

verbal group nominal group adverbial group or preposition phrase The point may be explicit by the figure 2.6

The lion chased the tourist lazily through the bush Participant Process Participant Circumstance Circumstance nominal

group

verbal group nominal group adverbial

group

preposition phrase

Figure 2.6 Components of a process

However, components of a process may vary in different types of process A process of a clause is typically recognized by the verbal group included Therefore, with a variety of verb types, we have various correspondent processes By and large, clauses are likely to be recognized as one of the following processes

Material processes, processes of “doing” and “happening”, express the notion that some entity “does” something in active structures or something may be ‘done” or “happen” to some other entity in passive ones Primary elements included in the process are Actor, Process and Goal as illustrated in Figure 2.7

The lion Catch the tourist The tourist was caught by the lion

Figure 2.7 Material process in active and passive clause

Mental processes, processes of “sensing”, are concerned with our experience of the world of our own consciousness They denote to our feeling, thinking or perceiving Main elements in the Mental processes include Senser – the conscious being that is feeling, thinking or seeing , Phenomenon- what

is felt, thought or seen and Phenomenon which constitutes the principle types as Perception (seeing, hearing, etc.), Affection (liking, fearing etc.), Cognition (thinking, knowing, understanding, etc.) and Volition (wanting,

sub-needing, intending, desiring, hoping and wishing, etc) Figures 2.8 will clarify the point

Senser Process: affect Phenomenon Senser Process: desideration

It worries me how silent everything is Phe- Process: affect Senser - nomenon: fact

Figure 2.8 Illustration of mental processes

Relational processes, processes of being and having, are processes whose meanings are aimed to characterize and to identify Every language accommodates, in its grammar, some systematic construction of relational processes The English system operates with three main types of relation –

“intensive”, “possessive” and “circumstantial” and each of these comes into two distinct modes of being – “attributive” and “identifying” These two systems intersect to define six of categories of “relational” clause, as set out in Table 2.5, adapted from Halliday (2004)

Table 2.5 The principle categories of ‘relational’ clause

(i) attributive ‘a is an attribute of x’

(ii) identifying ‘a is the entity of x’ (1) intensive ‘x is a’ Sarah is wise Sarah is the leader;

the leader is Sarah

(2) possessive ‘x has a’ Peter has a piano The piano is Peter’s;

Peter’s is the piano

(3) circumstantial ‘x is

at a’

The fair is on Tuesday Tomorrow in the 10th;

The 10th is tomorrow

The table shows one important difference between the “attributive” and

“identifying” mode The latter are reversible, but the former are not

In addition to these very large categories, three other subsidiary types should be recognized also: Behavioural, Verbal and Existential

Existential processes are processes which represent that something exists

or happens, and they are exposed with model “There (be) ” “There” has no

representational function It is required because of the need for a Subject In

these processes, Process may be the verb “be” or some other verbs expressing existence such as exist, arise, or others like come, grow, followed by a

nominal group functioned as Existent The Existent may be a phenomenon of any kind and is often an event or entity Let us observe the following examples and how they are analyzed as Existential processes

There was a storm On the wall there hang a picture

Process Existent:

event

Circumstance Process Existent:

Entity

Process Existent: entity Circumstance

There was an old woman tossed up in a basket

The summary of Processes as Representation presented above is hopefully a base for investigating the data in the next chapter to find out how Attitude markers are realized in the linguistic scope of clauses

2.2.5 Structures of word groups and phrases

A group is in some respect equivalent to a word complex It is a combination of words built up on the basis of a particular logical relation (Halliday, 2004, p 310) Halliday (2004) suggests that there are three main classes of groups: nominal group, verbal group and adverbial group The words are arranged in a certain order of the so-called experiential structure Adjective group which is not listed among these classes of group is formed by Attributive expanded by modifiers

To lay the foundation for further investigation of Attitude resource structures, this part aims to presents some basic points relating to various types groups inheriting from the perspective of SFG by Halliday (2004)

2.2.5.1 Nominal groups

Halliday (1985) claims that a nominal group contains the noun preceded and followed by various other items which occur in a certain sequence For example:

Look at those two splendid old electric trains with pantograph

The nominal group can be structured as in Figure 2.10

Those two splendid old electric train with

pantograph Deictic Numerative Epithet Epithet Classifier Thing Qualifier

Figure 2.10 Experiential structure of part of a nominal group

Membership within the class is typically expressed by one or more of the function elements: Deictic, Numerative, Epithet, Classifier and Qualifier Each of them will be considered in turn

- Deictic: The Deictic element indicates the specific subset of the Thing

The Deictic is either specific or nonspecific Specific Deictics include

Demonstratives this/these, that/those, article the and Possessives while

Non-Deictics consist of Qualifiers such as each, every, both, all, neither, no, one/a, either, some, any, etc…

- Numerative: The Numerative element shows some numeral features of

the subset either quantity or order, either exact or inexact The quantifying Numerative (quantitative) maybe specify exact numbers with cardinal numbers

or inexact number, e.g two trains versus many trains or a lot of trains

- Epithet: The Epithet indicates some quality of the subset, e.g old,

long, blue, fast etc… It may be an objective property of the Thing itself or it may be an expression of the speaker’s subjective attitude toward it, e.g

splendid, silly, fantastic,

- Classifier: The Classifier demonstrates a particular subclass of the

Thing in question The range of semantic relations of Classifier may include: material, scale and scope, purpose and function, status and rank, origin, mode

- Qualifier: Qualifier is the element which follows the Thing It also has

the function of characterizing the Thing Qualifier may be a major process,

i.e a relative clause termed Process or a minor process - a prepositional

phrase termed Range It can be presented in Figure 2.11

Figure 2.11 Qualifier in nominal group

- Thing: The Thing is the semantic core of the nominal group It may be

a common noun, a proper noun or a (personal) pronoun

To sum up, based on what has been discussed, the nominal group occurring from the beginning can be regarded as an ideal nominal group and can be interpreted and illustrated in Figure 2.12

Those Two splendid old electric train with

pantograph Deictic Numerative Epithet Classifier Thing Qualifier

group may contain only one word, e.g ate or a long string of word like

couldn’t have been going to be being eaten The structures of these cases

may be analyzed as Figure 2.13

ate Finite/Event

Figure 2.13 Experiential structure of the verbal group

In negative forms, verbal groups are expanded with the occurrence of marked negative polarity They can be described as follows:

Figure 2.14 Verbal group with marked polarity and contrastive tense

2.2.5.3 Adverbial groups

According to Halliday (2004), an adverbial group has an adverb as the Head An adverbial group may consist of only the Head Moreover, it may or may not be accompanied by modifying elements The Head may be pre-

modified by one or more grammatical items such as not, so, rather such

items have no labels other than Modifier The structure of adverbial group can

be present as in the figure 2.15 extracted from Halliday (2004) as follows

Easily more easily not so very much more easily

Figure 2.15 Pre-modification in the adverbial group

Post-modification of adverbial groups is of one type only, namely comparison Post-modifiers may be embedded clauses or embedded prepositional phrases This could be shown as in Figure 2.16

Figure 2.16 Adverbial groups with embedded post-modifiers

2.2.5.4 Adjectival groups

Lock (1996) believes that in the domain of clause, adjective may function as Attributives and they can be expanded into adjectival groups An adjectival group includes a Head adjective which can be pre-modified, most commonly by

adverbs, nouns, or other adjectives, for example very large, sky blue, dark brown

The Head adjective can also be post-modified The post-modifying element can be a finite-that clause, a non-finite to-infinitive, a non-finite present participle clause, or a prepositional phrase Here are some illustrations

I am very happy that you were be able to with us today

They were interested in everything under the sun

Adjectival groups

Figure 2.17 Adjectival groups

Like adverbial groups, adjectival groups can also be expanded for comparison One-syllable adjective Head normally forms comparatives with suffix -er, whereas adjective of three or more syllables can be pre-modified by

more and post-modified with than plus a noun group, a prepositional phrase, a finite clause, or a non-finite clause For example:

which was much larger than I remembered

being less dense than the water

being better than on the mainland

more important than learning X number of facts

In case of equal comparison, a category of comparison, the Head adjectives are modified by pre-modifier as and post-modifier as plus a noun group, a prepositional phrase, a finite clause, or a non-finite clause For example:

not as daft as you look

as fresh as when they are painted

nominal group, for example on the burning deck in which the preposition is

seen as a minor verb, a minor predicator, having the nominal group as its complement (Ju, 2008, p 189) It can serve as Adjunct in the modal structure

of the clause and post-modifier in a nominal group or an adverbial group