| The English commercial advertisement, a sub-genre of advertisement discourse, attracts the attention of researchers in recent years. A large amount of valuable studies have been conducted on this genre from different perspectives of linguistics. However, few scholars study it based on the Appraisal theory.Appraisal theory is a system of semantic resources to explore, describe and explain the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual persons, and to manage interpersonal relationships. It is a complement to Halliday's grammar-based model by focusing on the semantics of evaluation for exploring interpersonal meaning. Since its birth, Appraisal theory has been applied to many different discourse domains. However, there are still many discourse domains to which this theory has not been applied, the English commercial advertisement being one of them.In this thesis, the author conducts a tentative appraisal analysis of the English commercial advertisement, trying to explore the preference of appraisal resources, and then give relevant and reasonable explanations. A corpus of 40 English commercial advertisements, with a total of 6126 words, is chosen. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted to analyze the samples. Some tentative research findings have been discovered in this paper:Firstly, there are abundant appraisal resources in the forty selected English commercial advertisements. And the distributions of the three subsystems of Appraisal theory (Attitude, Engagement and Graduation) in English commercial advertisements are varied. The frequency of Attitude (51.7%) is the highest among the three, whereas Engagement and Graduation only account for a half of the total appraisal resources, each of them amounting to less than 30%. Besides, within each subsystem, distributions of their subcategories are uneven.Secondly, as for the Attitude subsystem of affect, judgment and appreciation, attitudinal meaning of appreciation (83.13%) is overtly and substantially foregrounded rather than affect (8.02%) and judgment (8.85%), because of the informative function of English commercial advertisements. Furthermore, among the three subcategories of appreciation—reaction, composition and valuation, commercial advertisers prefer to use more reaction resources (57.4%) to strengthen the attractiveness of advertisements. Although the occurrences of judgment resources only account for a small part, about 8.85%, they open up the space for negotiation between advertisers and potential consumers and reveal the dialogistic nature of advertising discourse. Affect resources are also indispensible in this discourse, although they only take up a very small proportion (8.02%).Thirdly, concerning Engagement, the study reveals that most of the commercial advertisements are written in the monoglossic way and very few heteroglossic options appear in the discourse. This can be attributed to the persuasive function of the commercial advertisement and its linguistic features of being concise and brief. And dialogic contraction (79.5%) is much preferred to dialogic expansion (20.5%) in managing heterglossic space.Fourthly, the two subcategories (force and focus) within Graduation have extremely unbalanced distributions in the English commercial advertisement—force (78.6%) is used much more frequently than focus (21.4%). Besides, most of the graduation cases are concerned with force-raising or focus-sharpening (grading up), with fewer force-lowering or focus-softening cases (grading down). This is related to the persuasive function of commercial advertisements, and it also attests to Martin and Rose's hypothesis (2003: 38) that in English, people seem to have more resources for turning the volume up than turning it down.This study will not only prove the applicability of the Appraisal theory in this particular discourse of English commercial advertisement, but also shed light on the reading and writing of this discourse.
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