Appraisal in sentences with modal adjuncts of the short story “Grace”, by Joyce, and of two of its reinstantiations into Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Appraisal is an interpersonal discourse semantic system that presupposes meanings of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation (Martin and White). This paper aims to explore in general the three appraising systems in the sentences with Modal Adjuncts of the short story “Grace”, by James Joyce (a), and in two of its Re-instantiations into Brazilian Portuguese, one by José Roberto O’Shea (Joyce b), and the other one by Guilherme da Silva Braga (Joyce c). The use of a three-tabbed spreadsheet was made for data classification and quantification. Results point out that Modal Adjuncts are important to the identification of appraising meanings. It can be concluded that the most frequent categories in the short stories are Judgement, Heteroglossia, and Force.

Keywords

• reinstanciação interlinguística
• valoração
• adjuntos modais
• contos