MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING QUY NHON UNIVERSITY TRẦN XUÂN BẢO TRÂN ATTITUDINAL RESOURCES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE MOVIE REVIEWS OF PIXAR’S MOVIES: AN APPRAISAL STUDY Field: English Linguistics Code: 8 22 02 01 Supervisor: VÕ DUY ĐỨC, Ph. e BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO TRƢỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN TRẦN XUÂN BẢO TRÂN PHÂN TÍCH NGUỒN NGỮ LIỆU THÁI ĐỘ TRONG CÁC BÀI ĐÁNH GIÁ PHIM PIXAR TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT Chuyên ngành: Ngôn Ngữ Anh Code: 8 22 02 01 Ngƣời hƣớng dẫn: TS. VÕ DUY ĐỨC e i STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I declare that this thesis titled “Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese movie reviews of Pixar‟s movies: An Appraisal study” is absolutely my original work. This thesis contains no material published elsewhere or extracted in whole, or in part of a thesis by which I have qualified for or been awarded another degree or diploma except where reference is made in the text of the thesis.
To the best of my knowledge and belief, I have not used any sources other than those listed in the bibliography and identified as references. This thesis does not incorporate with any material previously submitted for a degree or diploma in any university without acknowledgment. Quy Nhon, August 2021 Trần Xuân Bảo Trân e ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I gratefully acknowledge my deep appreciation to all of my teachers who have provided me with useful and interesting lectures, their precious works, materials and knowledge as well as invaluable consultation, which have helped me to lay the foundation for this thesis. In particular, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Dr.
Vo Duy Duc, my supervisor and my teacher. 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 22nd at the Quy Nhon University who gave me their help during the time I studied and conducted my thesis. Finally, with my heart, I can say that I owe my debt to my parents, who gave their unconditioned love and never-ended encouragement which is extremely significant for me to overcome a lot of troubles during the course and the study of this thesis.
e iii ABSTRACT This study employed Appraisal Theory in a contrastive analysis of Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese movie reviews of Pixar‟s movies. The data consists of 40 reviews of 9 movies (Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, Cars 3, Coco, Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4, Onward, Soul) which were produced from 2015 to 2020, collected randomly from reliable online resources. The overall purpose was to find out the similarities and differences between the two languages in terms of Attitudinal resources namely Affect, Judgement and Appreciation. The study was carried out through the adoption of quantitative, qualitative approaches and the use of analytic, synthetic and descriptive methods.
The results indicate that the three categories of Attitudinal resources all appear in both English and Vietnamese movie reviews. It was found that both languages tend to use more Appreciation than the other two Attitudinal resources. Similarly, the writers in the two languages tend to concern more on expressing the characters‟ feelings in the movies as well as the audiences‟ emotions. Also, the English and Vietnamese reviewers incline to evaluate human behavior explicitly via lexical items containing judgement.
Besides, the tendency towards the use of positive assessment dominates negative assessment in EMRs and VMRs. In spite of these similarities between the two languages, a number of differences were observed. Hopefully, the results of the study will offer the readers knowledge of evaluative language related to teaching and learning English. e iv TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP.
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS. vi LIST OF TABLES. vii LIST OF FIGURES. Aims and Objectives.
Scope of the study. Significance of the study. Organization of the study. METHODOLOGY AND PROCEDURE.
Reliability and validity. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. Overview of Attitude sub-types in EMRs and VMRs. Attitudinal resources used in EMRs and VMRs.
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS. Suggestions for further research. 86 e vi ABBREVIATIONS Aff : Affect App : Appreciation Auth : Authorial Cap : Judgement: Capacity Comp : Appreciation: Composition Judg : Judgement EMRs : English movie reviews Exp : Explicit Hap : Affect: Un/Happiness Imp : Implicit Inc : Affect: Dis/Inclination Non- Auth : Non- Authorial Norm : Judgement: Normality Prop : Judgement: Propriety Reac : Appreciation: Reaction Sat : Affect: Satisfaction Sec : Affect: In/Security Ten : Judgement: Tenacity Val : Valuation Ver : Judgement: Veracity VMRs : Vietnamese movie reviews (-) : Negative (+) : Positive e vii LIST OF TABLES Table 2. Judgement-Social Esteem.
Judgement-Social Sanction. Types of Appreciation .1 Frequency of Attitudinal resources in EMRs and VMRs .2 The distribution of Affectual resources in EMRs and VMRs .3 Positive and Negative Affect in EMRs and VMRs .4 Authorial and Non-Authorial Affect in EMRs and VMRs .5 Types of Judgement in EMRs and VMRs .6 The detailed distribution of Social Esteem and Social Sanction in EMRs and VMRs .7 Positive and Negative Judgement in EMRs and VMRs .8 Explicit and Implicit Judgement in EMRs and VMRs .9 The distribution of Reaction, Composition and Valuation in EMRs and VMRs .10 Positive and Negative Appreciation in EMRs and VMRs .11 Explicit and Implicit Appreciation in EMRs and VMRs. 75 e viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2. Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005, p.
Review of Attitude Subsystems (Martin & White, 2005, p. The Engagement system (Martin & White, 2005, p. A preliminary outline of Graduation. Sub-types of Attitude in the EMRs and VMRs.
Sub-types of Affect in EMRs and VMRs.3 Positive and Negative Affect in EMRs and VMRs .4 Authorial and Non-Authorial Affect in EMRs and VMRs .5 Types of Judgement in EMRs and VMRs. The detailed distribution of Social Esteem and Social Sanction in EMRs and VMRs .7 Positive and Negative Judgement in EMRs and VMRs.8 Explicit and Implicit Judgement in EMRs and VMRs.9 The distribution of Reaction, Composition and Valuation in EMRs and VMRs .10 Positive and Negative Appreciation in EMRs and VMRs .11 Explicit and Implicit Appreciation in EMRs and VMRs. 75 e 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This chapter presents the rationale, the aims and objectives of the study, the research question, the significance of the study, and the scope of the study. Rationale Entertainment is a form of activity that enables people to have joyful time, helps them relax and entertains them.
Nowadays, with the flourishing development of mass media, many forms of entertainment are available for everyone to choose and enjoy; one of them is movies. The industry of movie especially animation industry is now encountering a brand-new time and attracting the interest of most people. It is obvious that the animation industry has evolved to become a huge monster in the world of cinema and if a traditionally animated movie could give us a hand-drawn masterpiece in the past, a computer animation movie can charm us with its captivating and lively characters, stories, and worlds for a few decades. Hence, many animation studios have tried to produce more and more high-quality digital options and one of the most celebrated animation studios in the world is Pixar, whose stories have appealed to children, their parents, and pretty much every age group out.
This studio has released 23 movies since 1995 beginning with Toy Story – the first feature-length film created entirely by CGI (Computer- Generated Imagery) – to the latest movie Soul in 2020. All the movies have received many compliments from critics on their modern technology, emotional ride, and unforgettable characters. Therefore, a lot of reviews written after each movie premiere appear regularly in newspapers, magazines, broadcast media, and online publications. Today, movie review writing has become quite popular.
With the development of the Internet, there are a lot of genuine and useful movie e 2 reviews published on websites before and after the film is released. It can be seen that the writing style of the authors has an essential impact on the readers‟ feeling when they read the overall information about a film and decide whether they will watch that film or not. These movie reviews contain the writer‟s evaluation of the films, and even the aspiration to draw the attention of the audiences to those films. Therefore, it is necessary to take more notice of the language and the writing style which the authors used to write these reviews.
It is apparent that language is an important and effective tool for people to communicate with each other, to make requirements, to ask for permission, to express ideas or to evaluate, etc. In movie reviews, the writers use language to convey their evaluation of the movies and engage the audiences‟ attention. Therefore, a variety of linguistic resources are used to write a movie review. Thus, Appraisal Theory, which was developed by Martin and White (2005), has shown to be a useful tool for the analysis.
Although there have been several studies using the Appraisal Theory for analyzing the texts in terms of attitudinal aspects, a comparative study on critics‟ reviews for movies has not received much attention from linguistics and researchers. For the above reasons, I would like to choose the title “Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese movie reviews of Pixar’s movies: An Appraisal study” for my research. Aims and Objectives 1. Aims The study aims to investigate Attitudinal resources used in movie reviews based on English and Vietnamese online movie reviews of Pixar‟s movies to point out the similarities and differences in the way English and Vietnamese critics show their attitudes towards the movies.
Objectives To achieve the aim of the current study, the research is conducted with a focus on the following objectives: - To identify the linguistic features of the Attitudinal resources in the movie reviews of Pixar‟s movies in terms of Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation. - To find out the frequency of occurrence of Attitudinal resources used in the movie reviews. - To compare and contrast the frequency of Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese movie reviews. Research questions To fulfill the aims and objectives of the study, the following research questions are focused on: 1.
Which Attitudinal resources are used in English and Vietnamese movie reviews of Pixar‟s movies? 2. What is the frequency of occurrence of Attitudinal resources used in English and Vietnamese movie reviews of Pixar‟s movies? 3. What are the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese reviews of Pixar‟s movies in terms of Attitude? 1. Scope of the study Although the Appraisal theory consists of three systems, namely Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation, this study focuses on attitudinal aspects with its three sub-systems: Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation.
Moreover, the data to conduct this study merely concentrates on movie reviews from online publications. To be more specific, 40 reviews of 9 movies (Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, Cars 3, Coco, Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4, Onward, Soul) which have been produced in the e 4 past 5 years (from 2015 - 2020) were chosen randomly from English and Vietnamese mainstream online media with 20 reviews from English newspapers and 20 reviews from Vietnamese ones. Significance of the study Movie reviews, as a new type of discourse, have attracted many researchers‟ attention in recent years and there have been many studies on movie reviews from various perspectives. However, there are few studies about movie reviews that are from the perspective of Appraisal theory.
Theoretically, the study uncovers the Attitudinal resources operating in English and Vietnamese movie reviews. Moreover, this study provides several material sources for further research and it also supplies more materials to researchers who are interested in Appraisal Theory and the framework of Attitude system.