Graduation
The previous sections mentioned that the semantic resources of attitude can be employed in text to give values to emotion and feelings, a person’s character and morality, as well as a thing’s or a phenomenon’s aesthetics and value; on the other hand, academic writing often involves the use of the engagement resources to consolidate writer-reader relationship, project writers’ voice, and acknowledge references. This section deals with their general property of down-scaling and up-scaling in terms of degrees of positivity and negativity, or their “gradability” (Martin & White, 2005, p. 135).
The resources to grade attitudinal and engagement resources are referred to as graduation. Table 7 illustrates the options for graduation (Martin & Rose, 2003, p. 43). FORCE either intensifies or lowers the degree of the graded items, while FOCUS deals with sharpening and softening the graded items.
| FORCE | intensifiers |
he still plays great; he is a very powerful player |
| attitudinal lexis |
the second part is fantastic | |
| metaphors | ice cold in a sweltering night | |
| swearing | dammit, there must a clique | |
| FOCUS | sharpen | a true guitar legend |
| soften | a part-time blues fan |
Table 7. Options for graduation (Martin & Rose, 2003)
The lexico-grammatical realisation of graduation is not confined to adjectives or adverbs. In the following examples extracted from literature reviews in Table 8, hedges, prepositional phrases and so on are common semantic resources to strengthen/weaken force or focus of ATTITUDE and ENGAGEMENT.
| Text | Items | Graded items | Type | Lexico-grammatical realisation |
| Perhaps what is more important to consider in the context of Hong Kong are cultural factors… | perhaps | the whole clause | focus: soften |
adverb |
| more | important | force: intensifier |
adverb | |
| The deficiency of this method is evidenced in the 2007 study by Fung and Carter which makes special reference to Hong Kong learner stating that… | special | reference | focus: sharpen force: attitudinal lexis |
adjective |
| Nature and culture are highly appropriate concepts in the teaching of conversational English and are repeatedly cited by Carter himself (2001) and with McCarthy (2004) and Fung (2007). | highly | appropriate | force: intensifier |
adverb |
| repeatedly | cited | force: intensifier |
adverb | |
| Carter himself (2001) and with McCarthy (2004) and Fung (2007). | in-text citation | force: intensifier | noun phrases | |
| I would argue that students are more motivated to use authentic conversational English | would | argue | focus: soften | modal verb |
| more | motivated | force: intensifier | adverb |
Table 8. Examples of graduation realised in various semantic resources
