Applying Appraisal Theory To Images

Martin & Rose (2007: 325):

In terms of APPRAISAL developed in Chapter 2, images can inscribe feelings, for example with an image of a person crying or smiling, or invoke them with images that we respond to emotionally; they can invoke appreciation of things by the relative attractiveness of the object or scene presented; and they can invoke judgements of people, by means such as their activity, stance or facial expression. Engagement with the viewer can also be varied in images, for example by the gaze of depicted people looking directly at the viewer, obliquely to one side, or directly away from the viewer into the image. And of course feelings, appreciation and judgement can also be amplified and diminished.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is a basic misunderstanding that pervades work on APPRAISAL. The AFFECT system of APPRAISAL is concerned with interpersonal assessment through emotion, not with the ideational construal of emotion. The depiction of a person crying or smiling is an ideational construal of behavioural processes that manifest states of consciousness (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 302).

[2] To be clear, creating an image that induces an emotional response in the viewer is not a variation of creating an image that depicts an interpersonal assessment through emotion.

[3] To be clear, this blurs the distinction between an appreciative assessment made by the creator of an image and feelings of appreciation induced in a viewer by an image. This is analogous to blurring the distinction between what a speaker says and the reaction of the addressee to what is said.

[4] Again, this blurs the distinction between a judgemental assessment made by the creator of an image and judgements induced in a viewer by an image. Again, this is analogous to blurring the distinction between what a speaker says and the reaction of the addressee to what is said.

[5] To be clear, this misunderstands the APPRAISAL system of ENGAGEMENT, which is concerned with whether or not other points of view on propositions are acknowledged, how they are acknowledged, and to what rhetorical ends.  As Martin & White (2005: 92) explain:

[Engagement] is concerned with the linguistic resources by which speakers/writers adopt a stance towards to the value positions being referenced by the text and with respect to those they address … the different possibilities for this stance-taking which are made available by the language, … the rhetorical effects associated with these various positionings, and … what is at stake when one stance is chosen over another.

Martin & Rose, on the other hand, here misinterpret engagement as (metaphorically) realised by the behavioural stance of an entity of an image (metaphenomenon) relative to a viewer of the image (phenomenon). That is, this is 'engagement' in the sense of Kress & van Leeuwen (1996), but misrepresented by the authors as 'engagement' in the sense of Appraisal Theory.