Appraisal System from an Ecolinguistic Perspective

The Appraisal System is focused on the ontological meanings of appraisal resources in the language system, and its application to ecological discourse analysis should be preconditioned on certain extensions from the perspective of Ecolinguistics.In order to present an Appraisal System applicable to ecological discourse analysis, this paper first of all establishes a general and feasible ecosophy, i.e."diversity and harmony, interaction and co-existence" and then extends the Appraisal System in three dimensions, i.e.adding affect origination, judgement standard and appreciation object to the attitude system; adding engagement orientation, engagement source and engagement content to the engagement system; and adding reference scale to the gradation system.Hence, all the three extended systems of attitude, engagement and gradation are integrated with the ecosophy into an Ecological Appraisal System.