EVALUATION OF POLARITY IN ENGLISH AND PERSIAN EPIC REVIEWS: A CROSS-CULTURAL LITERARY ANALYSIS

This study evaluated words that convey an item, as well as the evaluation polarity (i.e., positive, negative or no-polarity) in English and Persian epic reviews. Attitude (Martin & White, 2005) is concerned with our feelings, including emotional reactions, judgments of behavior and evaluation of things. These attitudinal evaluations are of interest not only because they reveal the speaker’s/writer’s feelings and values but also because their expression can be related to the speaker’s/writer’s status or authority as construed by the text, and because they operate rhetorically to construct relations of alignment and rapport between the writer/speaker and actual or potential respondents. Based on Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory strategy, 40 English and Persian epic reviews (20 reviews of each) were selected and scrutinized to classify the expressions of attitudes (affect, judgment, appreciation). Moreover, they were analyzed to reveal Polarity. The results revealed that the difference of attitude expressions through two corpora was significant, but in terms of Polarity, only negative evaluations had significant differences.