Appraisal- An Emerging Theory of Evaluation

The theory of Appraisal framework was developed by Jim Martin, Peter White and their other associates and is useful in interpreting and analyzing any text while critically choosing those lexical choices which are related to our emotions, our behavior and appreciating things. The present work is about how interpersonal can be evaluated in language Systemic Functional Linguistics identifies three modes of meaning making resources in language. This means that all utterances realize three metafunctins of a language i.e. the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual. Appraisal can be traced within interpersonal metafunction. Appraisal has three domains in it; attitude, engagement and graduation Appraisal is concerned with evaluation and it is probably most closely related to the concept of stance as developed by Biber and his colleagues in their corpus based quantitative studies Appraisal framework can be a very powerful tool for negotiating social relations. In the present work Appraisal as a discourse semantics system has been proposed along with its subsystems.