A study of the Signature of soap opera characters: From the perspective of appraisal theory in systemic functional linguistics

Objectives The purpose of this paper is to analyze Appraisal, one of the theories of discourse meaning analysis in Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL), in relation to the Appraisal patterns of specific individuals. In SFL, this is called Signature. Methods Therefore, this paper focuses on the Signature of 11 characters in the entire script of episode 1 in <What is Love?>. The specific work was conducted in two stages. First, lexical evaluators (I), which examines the types and frequency of Affect, Judgment, Appreciation, and Graduation; and second, grammatical evaluators (II), which examines the number of sentences, types of Mood, types of addressee deference and Engagement words. Results To summarize the results of the above two steps, (A) Need-dissatisfaction type Sim-ae is overwhelmingly frequent in Affect, Judgement, Appreciation, Graduation, and Engagement. She expresses all kinds of lexical evaluatives in a bold way. (B) Repressed and perverse type Sun-ja uses about half as many evaluatives as Sim-ae, but with very different ups and downs. Affect, which express how she feels, and Graduation, which control the intensity of her speech, are high, but Judgement, which evaluates the actions of others, and Appreciation, which express social respect or social approval of a given situation, are low. (C) Paternalistic and assertive Isa-jang is good at utilizing Judgement and Graduation, and is relatively low in Affect and Appreciation. (D) indecisive Park-isa rarely uses Jedgement. He uses the other evaluative words, Affect, Appreciation, Graduation, moderately frequently and appropriately. (E) Women are more likely than men to use Engagement for both setting(‘case-open’) and settled(‘case-closed’). Conclusions The study of Appraisal has a wide range of applications and is a highly scalable area of research. It is expected that the study of Signature can also find some generalizable patterns of Appraisal system if the analysis target is broader.