Appraisal Study of Multimodal Texts in China: Past, Present and Future

Appraisal studies in China, in most of the cases, have focused on linguistic texts, and the study of appraisal in multimodal texts is a relatively new field.For the purpose of further developing this theory, this paper examines appraisal studies of multimodal texts in China in the past two decades, and reviews the topics covered, methods used and problems found in the pevious research.It is found that the previous researches have mainly done three jobs:modelling appraisal in multimodal texts, evaluating individual multimodal texts, and reviewing the development of appraisal studies.Previous multimodal appraisal studies in China have followed two major approaches.One is Systemic-Functional-Linguistics based, and the other is Cognitive-Linguistics based.Both of the approaches concern the appraisal theory, the grammar of visual design, multimodal metaphor, and cognitive appraisal theory.This paper also offers some suggestions for future studies.