The Textual Organization of Attitude Resources in Chinese Texts

This article makes an attitudinal analysis of the Chinese text Lichi Honey, based on Appraisal System, and studies how the attitude resources are used to organize the text. It takes the bottom-up approach, first analyzing the attitude resources of the text, that is, the foregrounded appraisal elements, then exploring the role they play in organizing the text. It finds out that the attitude resources are connected with each other to form different attitudinal chains according to the source and the appraised, such as affect chains, judgment chains and appreciation chains, which interact with one another to promote the logogenetic process. The interaction of attitudinal chains can be presented in logico-semantic relations. Meanwhile the attitudinal chains work as the foundation of textual organization. According to them, the text is divided into four different phases, including beginning, development, climax and ending. They also play an important role in revealing the underlying theme, which is actually the writer's appraisal intension. In further studies we can use corpus to study genre and explore the textual organizational patterns of attitude resources in one genre.