A Study of Attitude in Art Criticism

Abstract

Functional linguistic research focuses on the dimension of "implementation," with research on "instance" and "individuation" being relatively scarce. However, Appraisal Theory provides a comprehensive method for realizing "instance" and "individuation". Appraisal Theory, as a type of empirical research method with strong capabilities in both operation and application, is heavily involved in a variety of fields such as literature, art, philosophy, news, and law. Overall, research in the arts is deficient. This study employs Appraisal Theory as a framework for analyzing the discourse of art criticism from the perspective of the attitude system, analyzing 83 art critiques chosen for their semantic meaning of emotion and valuation endowed by the writers in critical language. It performs identification, analysis, and classification on corpus resources in order to investigate the application of Appraisal theory in art criticism and summarize representation and feature of these attitudinal resources used. The author concludes that the attitudinal resources all involve affect, judgment, and appreciation, but are distributed unevenly.The feature demonstrates that more appreciation than affect and judgement is involved, more positive meaning than negative meaning is conveyed, and an explicit rather than implicit method is used. According to this study, the attitudinal resources effectively contribute to the establishment of relationships among the writer, artworks, and the potential reader, and they function well in appraisal by establishing a "resonance" relationship between the artwork and the potential reader within person. Key words: Appraisal Theory, art criticism, discourse analysis, interpersonal relationship