Appraisal Approach to Conflict Styles: Computational Mapping of Disputant’s Attitudinal Disposition Patterns in Family Mediations

This book contributes to the existing Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) literature in several ways. It expands SFL’s empirical scope to understudied, high-stakes institutional contexts like mediation, enriching our understanding of register and genre. Methodologically, this research bridges computational data mining with SFL’s meaning-oriented tradition, providing a solution to the ‘delicacy vs. scale’ dilemma which is capable of handling large-scale conversational data while preserving linguistic and sociological insights. Furthermore, the research extends existing SFL/Appraisal-based identity studies by tracking the co-occurrences of all evaluative options within the Appraisal system network, systematically mapping the relationship between the reservoir of meanings in a culture and the repertoire a given individual can mobilize, as well as the relationship between the reservoir of systems populating the realization hierarchy and their actualization in text.

Targeted at scholars in linguistics, discourse analysis, communication studies, and computational social sciences, this book offers a sophisticated understanding of how language functions as a dynamic tool for identity negotiation. It provides researchers and practitioners with innovative theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches for analysing discursive behaviours in high-conflict interactions. This book also provides practical insights for mediation practitioners, demonstrating how language can be strategically employed to facilitate more effective communication and resolution strategies.

Qingxin Xu is an associate professor in the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures at Xiamen University, where she is also a member of the Language, Cognition, and Intelligence Lab. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research integrates nuanced linguistic analysis with data mining techniques to investigate evaluative meaning-making patterns in both digital and traditional media.