1. Attitude/Affect 22

Text Analysis: some discussion

From such an analysis, it quickly becomes apparent that values of Affect play a key role in this writer's evaluative strategy, particularly values to do with anger, hate, and love. In order to more easily see how these values are mobilised in the text, I provide below a further analysis which focuses on the key Affectual values. The analysis,

1. sets out just those phrases or clauses in which one of these key values occurred,
2. indicates which of the following more general emotional categories the values fall into (Fear & Distress, Hate & Contempt, Anger, Love & Happiness),
3. indicates who is the source of the emotion (the 'emoter') and
4. indicates who is target or the trigger of the emotion

		Emoter	Target
A troubled2A man:	Distress	Eminem
Debbie says her son's vitriol2B is an act	Anger	Eminem
FOUL-mouthed rap sensation Eminem - real name Marshall Mathers - has horrified4A parents .	Fear	parents	Eminem
I am the most hated5A person on this planet.	Hate	people generally	Author
I've been spat on5B by kids in the supermarket.	Hate	kids	Author
all the parents who I know are horrified6A by the lyrics to his songs	Fear	parents	lyrics
He doesn't hate8A women or homosexuals	Hate	Eminem	women etc
His answer was the more foul he was the more people loved9A him.	Love	people generally	Eminem
If he wrote a song about how much he loved10A his mother and little brother,	Love	Eminem	mother etc
he'd be laughed at10B.	Contempt	people generally	Eminem
Marshall remains very angry with me	Anger	Eninem	Author
I love him so much	Love	Author	Eminem
He has hurt me terribly	Distress	Author	Eminem
I once asked him why he was so angry with me.	Anger	Eminem	Author
he would have hated me even more	Hate	Eminem	Author
and he just stormed out.	Anger	Eminem	Author
if he hated me so much	Hate	Eminem	Author
turned all his anger on me.	Anger	Eminem	Author
He loves Hailie so much	Love	Eminem	daughter
He was delighted.	Happiness	Eminem	brother
I have always loved kids and fostered four	Love	Author	children
One of those troubled souls was Kim Scott	Distress	girlfriend
Until then Marshall was a normal, happy boy.	Happiness	Eminem
She changed him, she wound him up,	Anger	Eminem	girlfriend
and they had the most terrible rows.	Anger	Eminem/ girlfriend
I had to break up the cursing between them.	Anger	Eminem/ girlfriend
When they had a row he took it out on his car,	Anger	Eminem/ girlfriend
he would come screaming home	Anger	Eminem	girlfriend
Another thing that deeply traumatised him as a youth was the death of his uncle Ronnie, my brother.	Distress	Eminem
When Ronnie killed himself, Marshall was devastated.	Distress	Eminem
Nathan told me and I am very angry with Marshall for doing that.	Anger	Author	Eminem
There was a mess up over a car repayment and he went berserk and blamed me.	Anger	Eminem	Author
he resents I sheltered him so much from the real world.	Anger	Eminem	Author
I am guilty of loving my son too much.	Love	Author	Eminem

My purpose here is not to provide a detailed analysis of the text but to provide a few hints as to the sorts of insights which such an Attitudinal analysis may provide. We, might, for example, be interested in exploring the author's apparent communicative purposes and the Attitudinal choices by these have been pursued. To me, they are intriguing. Here, of course, we have entered the strange, netherworld of celebrity and pop-stardom US style where, as in this case, mothers feel the need to defend themselves before the world (and take legal action) against accusations levelled at them by their children. (The article appeared at a time when the author, Debbie Mathers-Briggs, was suing her son for £6.8 million over some of his lyrics in which he suggested his mother used marijuana, or more strictly that "My mom smokes more dope than I do".) Our analysis reveals the author to be working with the following attitudinal profiles:

• the author (the mother) is hated by "everyone" as a result of her son's words/action, but she, the mother, loves children (including 'waifs and strays') and more particularly goes on loving her son regardless.
• Eminem (the son) doesn't really hate (despite his lyrics) but only wants to be loved. He used to love children/his brother and he now loves his daughter. He has been greatly distressed by the death of his uncle. He is now permanently angry, with his partner and more particularly his mother

The author's strategy then, with respect to arousing our sympathy and winning our support for her own position, is to declare herself universally hated and unstintingly loving. Her strategy with respect to her son is somewhat more complicated. She purports, at one level, to be defending her son and explaining his actions - as a 'good mother should'. Thus she reports on his prior-to loving nature, his distress at his uncle's death etc. And yet, of course, given the amount of words documenting her son's 'unmotivated' anger, this is a very strange sort of defence, a defence which fades very rapidly into accusation and recrimination. This is damming with fading praise and even louder damnation.

We notice, as well, how self-centric the article is with respect to textual organisation, and especially with respect to the opening and closing stages. The author begins by documenting the hatred currently being directed against her and ends by declaring the resilience of her love for her vitriolic son.

The system of Affect in greater detail

The notes to this point have outlined the system of Affect in broad outline. The Appraisal framework provides for an analysis of this set of meanings in greater detail and with a greater delicacy of analysis. That is to say, it provides a much more fine-grained set of sub-categories of types of Affect to enable more detailed analysis of Affectual choices. Sections exploring this more delicate level of analysis will be added here later. For now you may like to look at the summary of these categories provided in the Appraisal Outline on the appraisal web site at (www.languageofevaluation.info/appraisal) or you may like to consult either Martin 1997 or Martin 2000 where a full discussion is provided.

Reference List

Martin, J.R. 1997. 'Analysing Genre: Functional Parameters', in Genres and Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School, Christie, F. & Martin, J.R. (eds), London, Cassell: 3-39.

--- 2000. 'Beyond Exchange: APPRAISAL Systems in English', in Evaluation in Text, Hunston, S. & Thompson, G. (eds), Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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