In systemic functional linguistics, the appraisal system — affect, appreciation, and judgement — has long been used to categorise attitudes expressed in language. These categories help analysts identify feelings, evaluations of objects, and social assessments. But what if we looked at them through a different lens? What if, rather than reflecting capacities in themselves, these categories are symbolic overlays on underlying coordination systems?
Affect: Symbolic Readiness
Affect labels emotions like happiness, fear, or anger. Yet these feelings are inseparable from embodied systems tuned to their environments. Through this lens, affect in discourse is not a direct index of internal states but a symbolic representation of readiness or relational alignment. When a speaker says “I am pleased,” the appraisal system models a socially intelligible projection of a body already attuned to opportunity, risk, or cooperation.
Appreciation: Symbolic Ecological Assessment
Appreciation evaluates objects, artefacts, or phenomena (beautiful, valuable, functional). Here, the appraisal system models how symbolic meaning is layered onto ecological or perceptual judgements. Calling a landscape “beautiful” or a design “functional” encodes an interpretive overlay on interactions that are already being guided by attention, perception, and ecological sensitivity. The symbolic evaluation compresses these dynamic interactions into shareable, communicable meaning.
Judgement: Symbolic Social Capacity
Judgement assesses people’s behaviour (ethical, admirable, normal). Competent social interactions often occur before or outside symbolic codification. Judgement overlays moral and social meaning onto these interactions, translating coordination into culturally intelligible categories. What is flagged as “deviant” may not indicate incapacity but a misalignment with symbolic expectations.
Illustrative Example
Consider a classroom scenario:
A student hesitates before answering a question (competence/readiness in action).
The teacher comments, “I’m disappointed you didn’t speak up” (judgement overlay).
Another student notes, “That was a clever way to think about it” (appreciation overlay).
A peer observes, “You seemed nervous” (affect overlay).
Each appraisal does not measure the student’s raw coordination; it projects symbolic meaning onto the student’s embodied, situational capacities. This illustrates how appraisal captures the overlay of meaning, not the underlying competence.
Why This Matters
Reading the SFL attitude system as a symbolic overlay clarifies several patterns:
It explains why appraisal can feel moralising or inflated: the system captures the overlay, which can outpace actual competence.
It shows that affect, appreciation, and judgement are tools for coordinating meaning, not raw indices of internal or ecological capacities.
It suggests a methodological principle: analysts should distinguish symbolic representation from embodied coordination to understand what discourse reveals about underlying competence.
A Practical Takeaway
SFL’s attitude system is powerful precisely because it formalises the very overlay our recent series on meaning identified as both enabling and potentially hazardous. By recognising that appraisal categories sit above competence rather than in it, we can:
better interpret discourse without over-attributing internal states,
understand symbolic inflation and its social consequences, and
design analyses that respect the separation between readiness and symbolic evaluation.
In short, affect, appreciation, and judgement are not simply measures of what people feel, value, or do; they are instruments projecting meaning onto the systems that actually make action and coordination possible.
