In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), appraisal refers to the ways that writers or speakers express approval or disapproval for things, people, behaviour or ideas.[1] Language users build relationships with their interlocutors by expressing such positions. In other approaches in linguistics (including linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics), alternative terms such as evaluation[2][3] or stance[4][5] are preferred.
J.R. Martin and P.R.R. White's approach to appraisal regionalised the concept into three interacting domains: 'attitude', 'engagement' and 'graduation'.[1] Each of these has various sub-systems; for example, 'attitude' includes 'affect' (expression of emotion), 'appreciation' (evaluation of things/entities), and 'judgement' (evaluation of people and their behaviour), with different choices within these sub-systems.[1] In the case of 'affect', for instance, these more delicate choices relate to different types of emotion.[1][6] However, there is debate about the different sub-systems that should be recognised, and various researchers have since suggested modifications of the initial description.[7][6]
The analysis of appraisal has also become influential outside Systemic Functional Linguistics, in various types of discourse analysis.[8]
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