Functional Grammar: Course homepage. Appraisal. Return to Appraisal Homepage An introductory tour through appraisal theory Introduction Appraisal theory is concerned is concerned with the linguistic resources for by which a texts/speakers come to express, negotiate and naturalise particular inter-subjective and ultimately ideological positions.
Within this broad scope, the theory is concerned more particularly with the language of evaluation, attitude and emotion, and with a set of resources which explicitly position a text's proposals and propositions interpersonally. That is, it is concerned with those meanings which vary the terms of the speaker's engagement with their utterances, which vary what is at stake interpersonally both in individual utterances and as the texts unfolds cumulatively.
SFL Home. Some genre distinctions. Notes on Genre and Register An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics (Suzanne Eggin's version of Halliday) quotes Martin: a genre is a staged, goal-oriented, purposeful activity in which speakers engage as members of our culture (Eggins, 26) Genres embody the "context of culture" for a text, which wraps the "context of situation" (giving register).
She later distinguishes between pragmatic motivations and interpersonal motivations, with the latter (typically: chat) having more phases than stages.