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Overview

The final subcategory of Attitude is termed, APPRECIATION. As indicate previously, we categorise as APPRECIATION those evaluations which are concerned with positive and negative assessments of objects, artefacts¹, processes and states of affairs rather than with human behaviour. In some instances, however, human participants may also be `APPRECIATED' - in cases where the assessment does not directly focus on the correctness or incorrectness of their behaviour. The most obvious values of APPRECIATION are concerned with what is traditionally known as aesthetics, with positive or negative assessments of the form, appearance, construction, presentation or impact of objects and entities.

Appreciation and the other categories of Attitude

We have looked so far looked in some detail at two sub-types of Attitude: AFFECT and JUDGEMENT. As we have seen, AFFECT is concerned with emotional states and responses, while JUDGEMENT is concerned with normative assessments of human behaviour. Thus under AFFECT, the evaluation is explicitly that of some human subject, the individual or group which is represented as making this or that emotional response or being in this or that emotional state. AFFECT, therefore is very explicitly subjective. When the AFFECTUAL values are those for which the author takes responsibility (the author's own emotional responses and states) they have the effect of strongly personalising the text, of foregrounding the individual role of the author and his/her evaluative position in producing and shaping that text. In contrast, JUDGEMENT is not so explicitly located in the consciousness or subjectivity of a specified human participant since JUDGEMENT values are presented as qualities of the phenomenon being evaluated rather than of the person doing the evaluating. Thus the AFFECTIVE value of `loving' in `Everyone loves Fred' is a quality or property attributed to `everyone' (the emoter/appraiser) while the JUDGEMENT value of `genius' in `Fred is a genius' is a quality attributed to Fred (the appraised). As a consequence, values of JUDGEMENT, at least in relative terms, may be somewhat less personalising, at least to the extent that they don't require that the appraiser be actually represented in the text.

APPRECIATION shares with JUDGEMENT this property of being oriented towards the `appraised' rather than the subjective `appraiser'. Values of APPRECIATION are properties which attach to the phenomenon under evaluation rather than the human subject doing the evaluation. Thus a value of APPRECIATION such as `beautiful' in `a beautiful sunset' is represented as residing in the `sunset' rather than in the person doing the evaluation. Such values involve a manoeuvre by which the subjective, individual, contingent evaluative response by the appraiser is transferred from that appraiser and represented as a property which is possessed of the evaluated entity. The evaluation is thus to some degree `objectified' and values of APPRECIATION share with JUDGEMENT the property of being less directly personalising, at least relative to values of AFFECT. Thus is it is more directly personalising to declare `I just adore that new movie Crouching Tiger, it really thrilled me' than to declare `The new year has provided a masterpiece in the shape of Ang Lee's martial arts epic.' This, of course, is not to overlook that all values of JUDGEMENT and APPRECIATION necessarily indicate the subjective involvement of some human participant - it is just that, with JUDGEMENT and APPRECIATION, that subjective involvement may be implied rather than directly represented.

Distinguishing Appreciation from Judgement

The instances of APPRECIATION which can, perhaps, be most easily distinguished from JUDGEMENT values are those involving aesthetic evaluation of physical objects or material circumstances/state of affairs - for example, `a beautiful sunset', `an ugly scar', `a striking vista', `the sleek lines of the E-type Jaguar', `the squat, constricted form of the Morris Minor'. Such assessments clearly do not reference human behaviour, at least not directly. They don't involve assessments of right and wrong or correct and incorrect. While negative values of JUDGEMENT attribute some sense of `blame' to the human participant who is thereby evaluated, this is not the case with negative values of APPRECIATION. To `blame' a Morris Minor for being `squat' would, in most contexts be incongruous (unless, of course, we are seeking to humanise or personify the car for our own argumentative or poetic purposes). This follows naturally from the fact that JUDGEMENT assumes the involvement of human consciousness, volition or intentionality. Accordingly, values of JUDGEMENT (at least in their adjectival form) can be slotted into the collocational frames of the type `It was corrupt of the Minister to accept these payments'; `It was dishonest of you not to tell her. `It was brave of Mary to stand her ground'; `It was clever of you to hide your wallet in the vegetables'; `It was eccentric of you to wear that hat.' (Collocational frame = It was Judgement-Value of Judged to Verbal Process). This is not possible of values of APPRECIATION. Thus the following would be incongruous - It was beautiful of the sunset to light up the sky like that. / It was ugly of the scar to gape like that.

Aesthetic evaluation of humans.

Aesthetic evaluation is not, however, confined to inanimate objects and states of affairs. It may equally apply to human subjects. Thus we may describe human individuals as `beautiful', `handsome', `ugly', `lopsided', `gangly', `striking' and so on. Such evaluations do not represent instances of JUDGEMENT because they do not involve assessments of behaviour - they don't involve normative assessments of right and wrong, correct or incorrect. Being `beautiful' or `ugly' in this physical sense is not a question of morality. Accordingly, such terms can't be slotted into the collocational frames outlined above. It would be incongruous to state, `It was beautiful of her to have such blue eyes'; `It was striking of her to have such red hair'. (It is important to note, however, that in the right context a term such as `beautiful' can take on moral associations and hence can operate as a value of Judgement. Consider, for example, `She was always kind, considerate and forgiving - truly one of the most beautiful human spirits I ever encountered.')

Types of Aesthetic Appreciation

One subtype of aesthetic APPRECIATION is concerned with composition, structure or form, with the question of how well the parts of the entity under evaluation fit together. These are exemplified by such positive terms as harmonious, well-formed, balanced, unified, intricate and negative terms such as ill-formed, convoluted, confused, unbalanced, discordant, contorted.

Another sub-type is concerned with presentation, with whether the entity under considering is pleasing or displeasing `to the senses', so to speak - for example, beautiful, lovely, splendid, breathtaking (positive); plain, ugly, drab (negative).

The situation is complicated somewhat by a third sub-type where we are dealing with values which make reference to, or are derived from, values of AFFECT (emotion). Here we are concerned with utterances such as,

A depressing sight met our eyes.

It's an extremely boring building.

It was a captivating performance.

A terrifying burst of lightening rent the air.

He's grown a deeply disturbing moustache.

These represent a complication because here we encounter terms (depressing, boring, captivating etc) which in other contexts and in other grammatical arrangements would indicate Affect , rather than Appreciation. Thus the following examples of values of Affect,

The sight of the all the dirty plates depressed me.

That type of architecture bores me.

She captivated me with her performance.

The burst of lightening terrified me.

I am disturbed by your moustache.

So why do we, for example, classify `a depressing sight' or `a boring building' as APPRECIATION rather than AFFECT? Crucial here is the fact that the emotional reaction (depress, bore etc) has been detached from any human experiencer of the emotion and been attached to the evaluated entity as if it were some property which the entity objectively and intrinsically possesses. To say that `the building bores me' (AFFECT) is to offer an individualised evaluation which depends entirely on my own, singular state of mind or emotional disposition. It says as much about me, the evaluator, as it does about the building. To say that `the building is boring' (APPRECIATION) is to offer an evaluation of a different order. It is to attribute to the building a property which is represented as being a fixed characteristic of that building, a quality which operates generally and which is not dependent on an individual or variable state of mind or emotional disposition. A connection remains, of course, with the individualised, contingent emotional response. It's just that the emotion has been generalised, objectified and detached from any individual subjecthood.

There are various indicators that this is APPRECIATION rather than AFFECT. For example, the value is oriented to the `appraised' rather than the `appraiser' in the sense that there is no human subject who is represented here as acting as the source of the emotional response. The building is simply `boring' - there is no-one being bored. We saw before that this is a feature which separates APPRECIATION (and JUDGEMENT) from Affect. Similarly, such meanings are not available for the collocational frames outlined above. Thus it would be incongruous to state, `It was boring of the building to feature mock Tudor stylings'.

A further complication - a fine line between Appreciation and Judgement.

In general then, JUDGEMENT is concerned with positive and negative evaluations of human behaviour while APPRECIATION is concerned, not with human behaviour, but with positive and negative evaluations of artefacts, states of affairs and entities (including humans when viewed as entities rather than volitional actors.).

A further complication arises, however, in cases where the grammar is ambiguous as to whether it is human behaviour or an object/entity/state of affairs which is being assessed. Consider the sequence,

1. `The design team prepared brilliantly for what lay ahead
2. `They are brilliant planners.'
3. `It's a brilliant plan.'
4. `It's a brilliant outcome'
5. `The blue-prints for the building are brilliant'

Now utterances 1 and 2, and utterance 5 would appear to be straightforward enough. Utterances 1 and 2 are clearly concerned with evaluating the design team's behaviour, with indicating a positive view of their competence in the activity of preparing and planning. Accordingly they involve values of JUDGEMENT. In contrast, utterance 5 is unproblematically an instance of APPRECIATION since it involves an evaluation of the properties of an object/entity - a ` blue-print'. (Such an APPRECIATION may reflect on the competence of the person or persons who made the object - in this case, a blue-print - but here the evaluation of behaviour is only an indirect one. The utterance first and foremost involves an aesthetic evaluation of the entity, not of the behaviour which produced it.).

Utterances 3 and 4 are somewhat less clear cut. The problem is that terms such as `plan' and `outcome' seem to have something about them both of things/entities and of verbal processes or happenings. Grammatically they are nouns and hence thing-like. And yet they are abstract - their reference isn't to any concrete entity which can be touched or located. It is not surprising that terms such a `plan' are sometimes termed `nominalizations' or `verbal nouns'. (See, for example, Halliday and Hasan 1985.) They can be seen as verbal processes which have been represented as if they are things or entities. The verbal process of `planning' (a behaviour subject to JUDGEMENT) has been represented as if it a thing or entity (and hence subject to APPRECIATION). So what do we make of a terms such as `plan' in propositions such as `It's a brilliant plan'? Do we treat them as referencing human action/behaviour or as referencing some type of entity or thing? Similarly, do we see the evaluation in `a brilliant plan' as assessing human behaviour (and hence as JUDGEMENT) or as assessing the intrinsic qualities of some object or artefact (and hence as APPRECIATION)?

We might start by delaying answering the question and ask another question. We might ask why we are seeking to make such relatively fine distinctions. Is there anything significant here in terms of linguistic insights? Well, the point here is that there IS something at stake communicatively and rhetorically when we choose between saying (1) `The design team planned brilliantly for all eventualities' and (2) `It was a brilliant plan covering all eventualities' . The difference in communicative effect may be subtle but it is nonetheless real - otherwise why bother to choose one over the other. Utterance 1 presents a proposition about how the design-team performed. The utterance is directly about the social standing of human individuals as a result of their behaviour. In utterance 2, the human aspect is backgrounded to a significant degree. It is not the social standing of human individuals which is addressed but the properties of some abstract entity (the plan). Human individuals are thus less directly targeted for praise or blame. Utterance 2, therefore, objectifies the evaluation to some degree, turning attention away from the human individuals themselves (the design team) and their behaviour and focussing it on the product or outcome of that behaviour (the plan).

The question, then, of whether `It's a brilliant plan' involves JUDGEMENT or APPRECIATION is worth pursuing. How do we go about answering it? Well, for a start, it's necessary to state that such cases involve borderline or fuzzy categories. Such cases involve evaluations which can be seen as ambiguous as to whether they assess human behaviour (JUDGEMENT) or the products of human behaviour (APPRECIATION). They would therefore represent a special sub-grouping of evaluations which are ambiguous as to what is put at stake in terms of attitudinal positioning and, in this, they stand apart from evaluations which are not ambiguous in this way.

Secondly, we need to insist strongly upon the importance of the actual textual context in which such values occur. What has been stated earlier in a text may well guide us towards seeing a particular value as more about human behaviour (and hence involving JUDGEMENT) than about the aesthetic qualities of some entity (and hence involving APPRECIATION) or, of course, visa versa. Additionally, the guidance provided by the type of collocational framing we explored above may, possibly, provide some useful guidance. If the term is one which could fit into the slot usually occupied by a JUDGEMENT value, then this maybe an indicator that it is better analysed as JUDGEMENT. Consider for example,