Analysis of Criminal Court Discourse on Steven Avery Case from the Perspective of Appraisal Theory

摘要

In the recent decades, studies on the legal English field has drawn an increasing attention among the academics, due to the development of global economics and frequent inter-cultural communications. In the late 1990s, P.R.R. White and J.R. Martina had proposed the appraisal theory, which mainly was an extension of the study of interpersonal meaning under the structure of SFL (Systematic Functional Linguistics). Up to now, it has been widely applied into many types of text analysis, such as pedagogical texts, academic texts and mass media texts. However, there are few researchers conduct studies by bring appraisal theory into the analysis of criminal court discourse texts. The paper is undertaken to investigate the application of J.R. Martin and P.R.R. White's appraisal theory in criminal court discourse, which primarily consist by profiling the main appraisal resources in criminal court discourse and its application on those resources. Based on the transcript of Steven Avery's case selected from the website and by means of descriptive and expository methods, this paper first describes all the appraisal resources in criminal court discourse, which are constituted by attitude, engagement and graduation, after the specific analysis, came the conclusion that the engagement resources are most frequently used. This study proves the feasibility of analyzing the criminal court discourse texts from the perspective of appraisal theory, enlarging the research range and providing a new insight for criminal court discourse. It is hoped that the study of criminal court discourse on the basis of appraisal theory will offer inspiration and assistance for legal practitioners from the angle of linguistics.