Abstract
This pilot study aims to gain some insights of the evaluative strategies in English and Chinese
used by three multinational luxury clothing companies: Chanel, Dior, and Louis Vuitton. Data
are the English and Chinese blog entries taken from these companies’ online corporate blogs.
Texts totalling 914 English words and 939 Chinese words are examined. To examine evaluation
in this study, Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal theory is adopted. According to White
(2015), the analytical framework of Appraisal theory should be regarded as an ever-developing
research project, and it can and should be adapted to fit the analysis of texts in different contexts
(Hommerberg & Don, 2015; Macken-Horarik & Issac, 2014). For this reason, an adapted
Appreciation framework of Appraisal theory, containing some luxury and fashion specific subtypes, is employed because this study focuses on the evaluation of artefacts in the luxury
clothing industry. The finding suggests that the Chinese data contains substantially more
Reaction, the only form of Appreciation that is related to emotion, than the English data.
Therefore, this study concludes that the text producers of the Chinese data may take a relatively
more emotional approach to persuade than the text producers of the English data. It highlights
the flexibility of the Appraisal framework by a field-specific and bilingual application and it
draws attention to the different evaluative strategies used in the English and Chinese data even
where the targets of evaluation are the same.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Transforming Contexts |
Subtitle of host publication | Papers from the 44th International Systemic Functional Congress |
Editors | Phil Chappell, John S. Knox |
Place of Publication | Wollongong |
Pages | 33-39 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Publication status | Published - 31 Dec 2017 |