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Description
This study employed Appraisal Theory in a contrastive analysis of Attitudinal resources in comments given by judges of American Idol and Vietnam Idol. The data for analysis consists of 100 comments (50 in American Idol and 50 Vietnam Idol) randomly collected from online websites. The overall purpose was to find out the similarities and differences between the two languages in terms of Attitudinal resources namely Affect, Judgement and Appreciation. The study is carried out through the adoption of quantitative, qualitative, analytic, synthetic, and descriptive methods.
The results indicate that the three categories of Attitudinal resources all appear in both American judges’ comments and Vietnamese ones. It was found that both languages tend to use more Appreciation than the other two Attitudinal resources- Affect and Judgement. Similarly, the judges in the two languages prefer expressing their own feelings and emotions towards or happening in programme to showing the feelings and emotions of other people. Another similarity is that the American judges and Vietnamese judges incline to evaluate human behavior explicitly via lexical items containing judgment resources. Besides, the tendency towards the use of positive assessment dominates negative assessment in CAJs and CVJs. In spite of these board similarities between the two languages, a number of differences were observed. In terms of Affect resources, while Dis/inclination in CVJs account for the least percentage of Affect resources, In/security is the lowest in percentage in CAJs. Additionally, as regards the use of Judgement resources, Normality in CAJs is more predominant than that of CVJs, so Normality value ranks the second in CAJs while this value accounts for the third rate in CVJs.
It is hopefully expected that the result of the study will provide useful knowledge of evaluative language related to give comments, opinions, viewpoints, or feedbacks to put it into practice in teaching and learning English as well as the daily communication.
