MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING QUY NHON UNIVERSITY NGUYỄN MỘNG KỲ DUYÊN AN INVESTIGATION INTO GRADUATION IN ONLINE FILM REVIEWS MASTER THESIS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE Binh Dinh - 2019 e MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING QUY NHON UNIVERSITY NGUYỄN MỘNG KỲ DUYÊN AN INVESTIGATION INTO GRADUATION IN ONLINE FILM REVIEWS Field: English Linguistics Code: 8.01 Supervisor: NGŨ THIỆN HÙNG, Ph. e BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN NGUYỄN MỘNG KỲ DUYÊN PHÂN TÍCH PHẠM TRÙ THANG ĐỘ TRONG ĐÁNH GIÁ PHIM TRỰC TRUYẾN Chuyên ngành: Ngôn ngữ Anh Mã số: 8.01 Người hướng dẫn: TS. NGŨ THIỆN HÙNG e i STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby declare that this thesis “An Investigation into Graduation in Online Film Reviews” has been composed solely by myself and that it has not been submitted, in whole or in part, to any previous degree or professional qualification. Besides, the experimental work is almost entirely my own work.
Furthermore, collaborative contributions have been indicated clearly and acknowledged. Binh Dinh, 2019 Nguyễn Mộng Kỳ Duyên e ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Throughout the writing of this thesis, I have received a great deal of support and assistance. Firstly, I would like to acknowledge my deep indebtedness to my supervisor, Dr. Ngu Thien Hung, whose expertise was invaluable in the formulating of the research topic and methodology in particular.
Without his enthusiastic guidance, helpful advice, and enormous encouragement, this thesis would never have been completed. I would like to thank all of my teachers for their valuable and interesting lectures, which helped me to lay the solid foundation for this thesis. In addition, I would like to thank my classmates, M.A students of English course 20th at Quy Nhon University with their helping during the time I studied and carried out my thesis. With my heart, finally, I want to thank my parents, my husband, and my little son, with their wise counsel and sympathetic ear which is extremely significant for me to overcome a lot of troubles from the beginning of the thesis.
e iii ABSTRACT This research examined Graduation used in online film reviews in the perspectives of Appraisal Theory. The research aims at finding out Graduation resources in online film reviews in terms of syntactic and semantic features. The study was conducted based on the theoretical background of Appraisal Theory by Martin & White (2005) and grammatical model of structural units by Quirk et al (1985). This descriptive study was conducted with the application of both quantitative and qualitative approaches.
The samples of the study consist of 20 film reviews in English collected from online websites. The findings reveal that the reviewers tend to use Graduation resources in form of adjective phrases in online film reviews in English to strengthen their assessment of the films to draw the readers’ attention with different tones of evaluation. Also, there is the overall tendency of Graduation resources under force category, especially expressions of number category to make the writers’ evaluation more believable. Hopefully, the results of the study will offer the readers knowledge of evaluative language related to teaching and learning English as well as daily communication.
e iv TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS. iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS. vii LIST OF TABLES.
viii LIST OF FIGURES. ix LIST OF CHARTS. Aim and objectives of the study. Aim of the study.
Objectives of the study. Significance of the study. Scope of the study. Organization of the study.
Overview of Appraisal Theory. Definition of Film reviews. 24 METHODOLOGY AND PROCEDURE. Sampling of study.
Population of study. 30 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. Syntactic features of Graduation used in online films reviews in English. Graduation resources used in online film reviews in English in form of nominal phrases.
Graduation resources used in online film reviews in English in form of verb phrases. Graduation resources used in online film reviews in English in form of adjective phrases. Graduation resources used in online film reviews in English in form of adverb phrases. Semantic features of Graduation used in online films reviews in English.
Graduation resources used in online film reviews in English as Force. Graduation resources used in online film reviews in English in terms of Focus. 73 CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS. To the learners.
To the teachers. Limitation of the study. Suggestions for further research. 81 e vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS SFL : Systemic Functional Linguistic SFG : Systemic Functional Grammar MCRs : Medical Case Reports NS : Native medical writers NNS : Non-native medical writers Ama : Adverb as Modifiers of Adjectives Amv : Adverb as Modifiers of Adjectives SA : Single Adjective CA : Comparative Adjective Spa : Superlative Adjective SN : Single Noun Cnp : Complex Noun Phrase Trv : Transitive Verb Inv : Intransitive Verb Sha : Focus: Sharpen Sof : Focus: Soften Qua : Force: Intensification-Quality Pro : Force: Intensification-Process Num : Force: Quantification-Number Dist : Force: Quantification-Extent-Distribution-Time Diss : Force: Quantification-Extent-Distribution-Space Prot : Force: Quantification-Extent-Proximity-Time Mas : Force: Quantification-Mass Num : Force: Quantification-Number e viii LIST OF TABLES Table Page Title number number 4.1 Graduation in form of nominal phrases 33 4.2 Graduation in form of verb phrases 37 4.3 Graduation in form of adjectives 45 4.4 Graduation in form of adverb phrases 49 Syntactic features of Graduation used in online film 4.5 51 reviews Graduation used in online film reviews in forms of 4.7 Graduation in terms of Intensification 58 4.8 Graduation in terms of Quantification 63 4.9 Graduation in terms of Focus 68 e ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page Title number number Graduation in form of nominal phrases with single 4.2 Graduation in form of complex nominal phrases 33 4.3 Graduation in form of transitive verbs 36 4.4 Graduation in form of intransitive verbs 37 4.5 Graduation in form of adjective phrases 44 4.6 Graduation used in form of adverb phrases 49 4.7 Graduation in terms of Intensification 57 4.8 Graduation in terms of Quantification 62 4.9 Graduation in terms of Focus 67 Semantic features of Graduation used in online film 4.10 69 reviews e x LIST OF CHARTS Chart Page Title number number 4.1 Graduation in form of nominal phrases 34 4.2 Graduation in form of verb phrases 37 4.3 Graduation in form of adjective phrases 45 4.4 Graduation in form of adverb phrases 50 The frequency of occurrence of Graduation in terms of 4.5 53 phrases The frequency of occurrence of semantic features of 4.7 The frequency of occurrence of subtypes of Graduation 71 e 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This chapter presents the rationale, the aim and objectives of the study, the research question, the significance of the study, and the scope of the study.
Rationale It is apparent that the films provoke all kinds of emotions. It can make you laugh, cry, suffer, and even find the strength you need to face your problems. Film Industry is one of the largest and fastest-growing industries in the world. The reason is not sophisticated.
People fond of entertainment, and the film is one of the entertainment fields. Movies are like books, only they are visual. In the Age of the Internet, people can save their time finding out a good film for themselves. The simple way is surfing the film review websites.
Today, film review writing has become quite popular. With the development of the Internet, many people are giving genuine and useful film reviews on movie review websites. It is a real station that many content writing firms are paying for talented writers to write high qualified film reviews and then post them on movie websites to earn a profit. Besides, individual movie critics are also writing film reviews.
It can be seen that writing film review implies a work of journalistic film criticism rather than of academic criticism. However, the problem here is the authors’ style in writing film reviews. It has an initial and essential impact on people’s feelings when they read the overall information about a film and decide to watch that film or not. These online reviews explore writers’ evaluation of the films, and even the desire to get the attention of the audiences to these films.
However, giving effective writing as their initial purposes is a challenging issue. Hence, it is necessary to pay more attention to the writing style. e 2 It is obvious that language is an important communicative tool for achieving various purposes. Language is a means for people to communicate with each other, to make requirements, to ask for permission, to express ideas or to evaluate, etc.
Actually, in film reviews, the authors use language to express their evaluation of the films and may engage the audiences’ attention. Hence, Appraisal Theory with three subtypes of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation, which was developed by Martin & White (2005), can be a useful tool to analyze the use of the language of the copywriters in writing film reviews. Besides the use of Attitude and Engagement resources to express the attitude and the desire to engage the audiences to the films, to express an overall and real viewpoint, the reviewers also use the words of Graduation resource. This domain deals with “grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred” (Martin & White, p.
In terms of semantic perspective, Graduation can be seen as the center of the Appraisal system. It can be stated that both Attitude and Engagement are two areas of Graduation for “the nature of the meanings being scaled”. Example: The movie is fun with lots of great comedic moments and a few new Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) duos that we never knew we needed. [B14] Is it my top favorite film in the MCU? No.
Is it in my top ten? Absolutely! The soundtrack is impeccable and deserving of multiple listens. [B18] I adored Danvers and Fury together, but I also found myself wanting more screen-time for Danvers and the Rambeaus. Not only does Maria show that she is a Black woman force who can handle her own e 3 in every situation, but her daughter Monica is really the future Captain Marvel in training that we need. [B15] It can be seen from these examples above that Graduation resources are used by the writers to express their evaluation of the film.
It is about the content of the film, the movie song, and the main characters. Moreover, the writers want to draw the readers’ attention to that film. For instance, the use of “great”, “absolutely”, “adored”, “more”, “really”, is for showing off the film reviewer’s overall evaluation of the mentioned film. Thanks to Graduation resources, the writers’ feeling about the film is revealed clearly.
If the writers do not use these words, they may be not able to achieve their purpose of attracting the attention of the readers to the film. Moreover, the readers can save time but still understand the main content of that movie. However, although there have been several pieces of research of film analysis through the linguistic base, a close study on Graduation in film reviews based on Appraisal Theory has not received much attention from linguistic researchers. It is the reason that inspires me to conduct a study to investigate the system of Graduation in film reviews with the topic: “An Investigation into Graduation in Online Film Reviews”.
Our research will identify the use of the syntactic and semantic features of Graduation in online film reviews. Aim and objectives of the study 1. Aim of the study The study aims to investigate how Graduation resources were used in online film reviews in English in terms of semantic and syntactic features in the light of Appraisal Theory.