Systemic Functional Linguistics Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is an approach to linguistics, among functional linguistics, that considers language as a social semiotic system. It was devised by Michael Halliday, who took the notion of system from J. R. Firth, his ...

(SFL), appraisal refers to the ways that writers or speakers express approval or disapproval for things, people, behaviour or ideas. Language users build relationships with their interlocutors by expressing such positions. In other approaches in

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

(including

linguistic anthropology Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass mo ...

sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language changes between distinct social groups, as well as how it varies unde ...

corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics is an empirical method for the study of language by way of a text corpus (plural ''corpora''). Corpora are balanced, often stratified collections of authentic, "real world", text of speech or writing that aim to represent a giv ...

), alternative terms such as evaluation or stance are preferred. J.R. Martin and P.R.R. White's approach to appraisal regionalised the concept into three interacting domains: 'attitude', 'engagement' and 'graduation'. Each of these has various sub-systems; for example, 'attitude' includes 'affect' (expression of emotion), 'appreciation' (evaluation of things/entities), and 'judgement' (evaluation of people and their behaviour), with different choices within these sub-systems. In the case of 'affect', for instance, these more delicate choices relate to different types of emotion. However, there is debate about the different sub-systems that should be recognised, and various researchers have since suggested modifications of the initial description. The analysis of appraisal has also become influential outside Systemic Functional Linguistics, in various types of discourse analysis.

References

Discourse analysis Evaluation Systemic functional linguistics {{sociolinguistics-stub