Author(s)

Liling Zou ¹, Youlin Zhang ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 101101, China

Corresponding Author

Liling Zou

ABSTRACT

Currently, the world is inevitably faced with the challenge of an aging society. Aging is accompanied by a variety of diseases that hasten death. Although in many cultures, people tend to avoid directly expressing death in language, with the booming development of mass media, death often breaks the original private discourse category and becomes a public concern. Between aging and death, hospice care concerns the quality of life of terminally ill patients. Therefore, it is urgent to study the elderly group’s death discourse expressed in the hospice stage. Based on the appraisal theory, this study analyzes the realization and distribution characteristics of attitudinal resources in western hospice care documentaries by taking the death discourse of the elderly as research data. It is found that affect resources account for the largest proportion of attitudinal resources, followed by judgment resources and appreciation resources. In addition, the proportion of positive attitudinal resources is higher than that of negative attitudinal resources. This study aims to enrich the theoretical research on domain-specific language use and establish a suitable language environment for the elderly.

KEYWORDS

Appraisal Theory, death discourse, attitudinal resources, the elderly, hospice care

CITE THIS PAPER

Liling Zou, Youlin Zhang, Analysis on the Characteristics of Death Discourse Based on Appraisal Theory: Taking the Elderly's Discourse in Hospice Documentary as an Example. Journal of Sociology and Ethnology (2022) Vol. 4: 42-45. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/jsoce.2022.040608.

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