APPRAISAL and the special instructiveness of narrative

Abstract

This article considers the role of APPRAISAL systems in narrative discourse from the point of view of writer/reader relations. It aims to uncover some of the mechanisms by which narratives ‘go to work’ on readers – enabling them to ‘feel with’ particular characters and to adjudicate their behavior ethically. The data used in this study includes one short written narrative presented to sixteen-year-old Australian students in a formal English examination and two successful written responses to this. The first part of the article focuses on the semantic attributes of the three texts. The narrative, CLICK, and the responses form an intertextual set from which we can learn much about a narrative’s addressivity and the kinds of uptake displayed in A-range readings. The successful responses (like others in the A-range corpus) embody a complex of attributes including an ability to read narrative texts relationally, a sensitivity to the hierarchy of voices and values played out in the text and attentiveness to both implicit and explicit forms of APPRAISAL. The second part of the article presents an analytical apparatus developed to linguistically model the development of empathy and discernment in ideal (and in this case, successful) readers as they read and respond to this narrative. Linguistic analysis focuses on how appraisal resources like AFFECT and JUDGMENT, their trends, their co-patterning and their transformation contribute to the creation of a text axiology in ideal readers. The article concludes by outlining some implications for analysis of evaluation in text if we take into account different conditioning environments for development of writer-reader relations.