Discourse analysis (013087)
Assessment Task 1:
The text I have chosen for analysis in this paper is from the film "Avatar" which, by the looks of it, appears to be a newspaper review written by Sebastian Cordoba and obtained from the internet. The main purpose of this type of film's review genre is to express a value about the film in question; whether be it a positive or negative one. It can be seen that the text has already been divided into four sections, which, invokes a stance point from the author in relation to the views or points he tries to direct the readership towards. In terms of the text genre; the first section (orientation), is dedicating to set the scene of the film; the second and third sections (events) deals with what the author consider of being the great and the good about the film and the fourth and final sections (judgment) the author expresses his overall view about the film.
In terms of the film genre Avatar; the film belongs in what is known as science fiction and fantasy genre.
In this paper, I will attempt to explore the attitude being conveyed by the text and how the author positions himself in relation to the readership of this review.
In order to draw a conclusion about the kinds of attitude the author describe in the text and the interpersonal relationship with the readership I draw on two sources for doing so; firstly, in addressing the discourse semantics of interpersonal meaning I draw on Appraisal theory (Martin, 2000: Martin and White, 2005), which posits three general domains: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement.
The further step in analysis is to determine the kind of attitude that is expressed. Martin & White (2005) sub-classify attitude into three kinds: as affect, expressing...
Chris Martin
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