Appraisal in Recounts Told by Persian Male and Female Web loggers

Appraisal theory, developed within systemic functional linguistics (SFL), has provided researchers with a powerful and comprehensive analytical tool to explore how language users express their feelings, attitude and judgment in monologic or dialogic texts. Unlike its widespread application in various contexts and genres, Appraisal has not been applied in recounts. Therefore, the present study was conducted to explore Appraisal in Persian recounts with a focus on its Attitude subsystem. After an initial survey of Persian personal weblogs, 48 recounts were selected (22 female writers and 26 male writers). The analysis was conducted two times with a one week of interval using the UAM corpus tool software. The results indicated that 1) women generally used more attitude resources in their recounts compared to men and they also used more Affect than men; 2) both men and women encoded their evaluation more explicitly rather than implicitly. This could be attributed to the nature of weblogs providing their writers with a mask of anonymity under which they can express their feeling freely without fear of negative consequence such as face loss; 3) interestingly in both types of recounts, Attitude subsystems appeared in special order in terms of frequency. In conclusion, this predominant use of Attitude in Persian recounts can be considered as an evidence of the effectiveness and applicability of Appraisal theory across cultures and languages.