An Analysis of the Engagement System of Vietnamese Research Articles in the Light of the Appraisal Framework

Abstract

Evaluation is widely accepted by many scientists as one of the most basic and important functions of language worth studying deeply. As a result, evaluative language has drawn a lot of interests worldwide. Yet, the Vietnamese language community appears to be rather unfamiliar with this term. In order to shed further light on the use of evaluative language in Vietnam, this article examines how evaluative language is exploited by Vietnamese linguists in a corpus of 35 Vietnamese empirical research articles in the light of the Appraisal framework by Martin and White (2005). More specifically, the study analyses the frequency of categories of the Engagement system in the Appraisal framework and studies in-depth realizations of the Contract sub-system. Results show that Contract resources are more frequently employed than Expand. Writers tend to contract their dialogues more in the Conclusion section of the articles. It is hoped that the research results will be a useful reference for article writers and they can contribute to the literature materials for the fields of evaluative language and academic writing pedagogy in Vietnam.