The Classification of Appraisals by Their Semantic Bases: New Wine into New Wineskins?

The article aims to design a classification of appraisals which can be used for the analysis of not only words as elements of lexical systems of different languages but also of various language units representing appraisals in texts. Different naive discourse texts, such as users' reviews on restaurants and cafes, hospitals, hotels, and films, were the material for the research. In its framework, discourse, context, and component analyses as well as comparative and classification methods were used. The research included four steps. First of all, the author collected data on different websites with people's reviews, such as nhs.uk, flamp.ru, tripadvisor.fr, etc. Then she analysed verbal means of appraisal representation in these contexts using N. Arutyunova's classification. The author found out that this classification is not fully sufficient for the material of her research. That is why, at the following stage, the author tried to find a more suitable classification among the existing Russian and foreign ones. It turned out that they were not very well applicable to naive discourse texts either. Finally, the author designed her own multilevel classification of appraisals, which adopted some general principles and types from Arutyunova's classification. The author's classification is the result of the entire research. Its main characteristics are as follows. At the first level, quantitative appraisals are opposed to qualitative ones. The latter are divided into general and particular appraisals. Particular appraisals comprise singular and complex appraisals. Singular appraisals represent only one type of evaluative characteristics in one language unit while complex appraisals combine two or more types within one unit. Singular appraisals include psycho-physiological (emotional and sensor) appraisals, effectiveness appraisals (capacity appraisals, teleological and utilitarian ones), and normative appraisals. The group of normative appraisals is the largest and includes properly normative appraisals, capacity appraisals, which lie at the intersection of effectiveness appraisals and normative ones, and many more types: true-false appraisals, rating appraisals, composition appraisals, medical, ethical, esthetic, intellectual appraisals, time appraisals, space appraisals, difficulty appraisals, security appraisals. All these types of appraisals describe adequacy of objects for certain standards, rules, traditions, etc.

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