Appraisal Resources In English Sales Promotion Letters

With the rapid development of the global economy, English business letters have become more and more important in recent years. As one kind of important business letters, English sales promotion letters usually are the first and key link in the course of the business transaction. An effective sales promotion letter not only serves as a business letter but also a good chance to advertise the product or service to the readers.As a kind of interaction between the writer and the potential customer, sales promotion letters focus on the interpersonal meaning rather than ideational or textual meaning. Appraisal theory is a recently developed theory for the further exploration of interpersonal meaning in Systemic-Functional Linguistics. This thesis adopts Appraisal theory as its theoretical framework with the aim to find out what kind of Appraisal resources are preferred in sales promotion letters and how they help to achieve the writer's communicative purpose.To ensure the research to be more scientific and accurate, we establish a corpus of 30 English sales promotion letters in this thesis. Both qualitative and statistical approaches are used in the process of data analysis. Statistical research is used to uncover the distribution and frequencies of the appraisal resources at different levels. And qualitative research is used to make a detailed explanation of the employment of appraisal resources and give a deeper account of the appraisal framework.This thesis is divided into seven chapters. Chapter One gives the introductory part of this thesis including reasons to choose sales promotion letters as the research data, reasons to adopt Appraisal theory, and objectives and significance of the present study. Chapter Two gives a brief introduction of the place of Appraisal theory in SFL and presents the literature review of studies on Appraisal theory and sales promotion letters. Chapter Three is an overview of sales promotion letters. In this section, the functions, classification and structure of sales promotion letters are introduced. Chapter Four elaborates the theoretical framework—Appraisal Theory which includes three subsystems—Attitude, Engagement, and graduation. Chapter five presents the methodology, which is made up of research design, data collection, and research procedures. Chapter Six gives a detailed and in-depth analysis of the 30 sales promotion letters, the aim of which is to reveal how the different appraisal resources help to achieve the communicative purpose of the sales promotion letters. Chapter Seven is the last part which serves as the conclusion of the whole thesis. In this part, the final findings, limitations of the present study and recommendations for the future study are given.This thesis makes a great contribution to the development of Appraisal Theory by applying it to a new field:sales promotion letters. It also provides a new perspective to the study of sales promotion letters and helps us to write sales promotion letters more successfully according to the communicative purpose.