Appraisal theory is concerned is concerned with the linguistic resources for by which a texts/speakers come to express, negotiate and naturalise particular inter-subjective and ultimately ideological positions. Within this broad scope, the theory is concerned more particularly with the language of evaluation, attitude and emotion, and with a set of resources which explicitly position a text's proposals and propositions interpersonally. That is, it is concerned with those meanings which vary the terms of the speaker's engagement with their utterances, which vary what is at stake interpersonally both in individual utterances and as the texts unfolds cumulatively.
The paper is intended to provide an overview of appraisal theory by way of an introduction. It therefore omits some of the detail and some of the more problematic areas of the analysis. As well, it excludes any extended exemplification of appraisal theory in action in authentic text analysis. More detail can be obtained on the appraisal website ( www.languageofevaluation.info/appraisal ) in the "Introductory Course in Appraisal Analysis" and in, for example, Iedema, Feez, and White 1994 or White 1998 (available as an e-mail attachment from Peter White at p.r.white@bham.ac.uk ).
Some of the key references on Appraisal include (in chronological order): Iedema et al. 1994, Martin 1995a, Martin 1995b, Christie and Martin 1997, Martin 1997, Coffin 1997, Eggins and Slade 1997 (especially chapter 4), White 1998, Martin 2000, Coffin 2000, White 2000, Körner 2001, Rothery and Stenglin in press, and a special edition of the journal Text to appear in 2002.
The following set of notes relies primarily upon Iedema et al. 1994, Christie and Martin 1997, Martin 2000, White 1998and White to appear from which most of the material is taken.
It must be noted that appraisal theory is very much an on-going research project - many problems are still to be solved and many lexicogrammatical and semantic issues have yet to be addressed. There are numerous registers and discourse domains to which the theory has not yet been applied. (Past experience indicates that analyses of new discourse domains typically lead to significant extensions to and elaborations of the appraisal framework since each domain will typically operate with at least some unique semantic features.) The community of researchers using the theory in some way, however, continues to grow and therefore we anticipate continuing breakthroughs in the mapping of this semantic domain.
Appraisal theory divides evaluative resources into three broad semantic domains:
