LyCE Estudios - Facultad de Filosofía y Letras - Universidad ...

LyCE Estudios 15 (2012)
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movie reviews, we examine the use of appraisal choices in authentic
reviews and compare our findings with the sample texts included in EFL
textbooks. In order to analyze the values that are expressed in relation
to the movie we focus on the stage Selective Analysis. Overall, this
stage evaluates either the movie as an object or its different elements
such as the director, the actors, the effects, etc. All these evaluative
meanings combine prosodically to convey the final evaluation of the
movie. This meta-evaluation expresses Appreciation: Valuation, either
positive or negative, of the movie as a social and cultural object.
The Appraisal resources most typically used then are:
Attitude:
inscribed and invoked positive or negative Appreciation:
Reaction: impact and Valuation
inscribed and invoked positive or negative Judgment: Capacity
Graduation:
Force: intensification (infusion and isolation) and quantification
Focus: sharpening and softening
The following examples illustrate these options. In all cases, the type of
inscribed attitude is underlined and indicated between square brackets
and invoked attitude is in italics. Graduation is in bold type 1 :
The Julia half of Julie & Julia is irresistible [+ap: reac], the
Julie half less so [-ap: reac]. Not that it doesn’t work, exactly
[+ap: val]. Amy Adams nails the obsessiveness of Julie’s
devotion to her muse, Julia [+jud: cap]. She also captures
the tactile pleasures, and challenges, of cooking (how in
God’s name does one bone a duck?) [+jud: cap]. And
Ephron gives us nothing less than the first full-scale
Hollywood portrait of the life of a blogger, in all its creative
fire and solitary, caffeinated, how many comments did I get?
1 Other values, especially invoked ones might be expressed in these samples. We have
tried to limit our present analysis to the most critical values that realize the
recommendation and we have also tried to keep the coding easy to follow.