On The Three Main Appraisal Systems

Martin & Rose (2007: 59):

Summing up, then, what we have are three main appraisal systems: attitude, amplification and source. Attitude comprises affect, judgement and appreciation: our three major regions of feeling. Amplification covers grading, including force and focus; force involves the choice to raise or lower the intensity of gradable items, focus the option of sharpening or softening an experiential boundary.  Engagement covers resources that introduce additional voices into a discourse, via projection, modalisation or concession; the key choice here is one voice (monogloss) or more than one voice (heterogloss). …

Blogger Comments:

[1] Trivially, the three most general appraisal systems are ATTITUDE, GRADUATION and ENGAGEMENT, as acknowledged elsewhere in this second edition.

[2] The characterisation of attitude as 'feeling' has led to the confusions identified in earlier posts, such as the metafuctional confusion of construing emotion (experiential metafunction) with appraising through emotion (interpersonal metafunction).

[3] This confuses the appraisal with the appraised.  FORCE is concerned with the intensity of the appraisal being enacted.

[4] This confuses the appraisal with the appraised.  FOCUS is concerned with the sharpening or softening of the appraisal being enacted.

[5] To be clear, the exposition of ENGAGEMENT is concerned only with instances of heteroglossia, and misrepresents its grammatical resources (projection, modalisation, concession) as its subsystems. For genuine examples of ENGAGEMENT subsystems, see White's Appraisal website.