The Study Of The Language Of Evaluation: An Attitudinal Analysis Of Chinese Motor Vehicle Advertisements

The Appraisal theory, first introduced by Martin in the early 1990s, is a theoretical system which is supposed to describe and explain the usage of language. It can be employed to analyze the semantic evaluation at the discourse semantic level and it also concerns with various negotiable attitudes in the discourse. By using this theory, language is used to express attitude, affect, judgment and appreciation, especially in the advertisement discourse, it can realize empathy, interaction with the reader and finally come to the purpose of persuasion.It is worth to do some further research on Chinese motor vehicle advertisement. As the development of world economy, motor vehicle is becoming an indispensable and important traffic tool in our daily life. It connects with people's life closely. In advertisement, the advertisers'ultimate goal is to impel potential customers to buy the product or service. Advertisers aim to sell certain product or service, while the potential customers, to seek information and benefit which can ultimately fulfill their materialistic and social needs is their primary purpose. Advertisement is persuasion-and-profit-driven on the advertiser's side and information-and–benefit-seeking on the potential customer's side. Usually advertisements are trying to praise some products or services and the author of the present research predicts that there must be a lot of attitudinal evaluations in the motor vehicle advertisements. Doing an attitudinal analysis of Chinese motor vehicle advertisement to reveal the implicit social relationship between the advertiser and potential customers can answer Martin's call to make a new add on discourse analysis to prove the feasibility of Appraisal System.Since Martin's setting up the Appraisal System, many domestic and foreign scholars have carried out theoretical research and development to make it better which makes it become systematic and well-known now. However, the actual text using in the appraisal area is still inadequate, so, it needs further study. We can also see that though some Chinese scholars did some research on motor vehicle, the study on Chinese motor vehicle advertisement is not adequate. In order to make up for the shortages, This thesis tried to do the discourse analysis of Chinese motor vehicle advertisement by using Appraisal system's subsystem-Attitudinal system as an analytical tool in all aspects so as to help people find out the empathy and interpersonal function in Chinese motor vehicle advertisement and to establish various relationships between the advertiser and potential customer.This study aims to analyses the interpersonal meaning from a new angel—the perspective of the Attitudinal system. In the aspect of Chinese motor vehicle advertisement writing, the study aims to find out and provide native motor vehicle advertisement designers with language strategy to attract customers more effectively by studying the data. The present study extends the scope of discourse analysis and simultaneously develops the application of Appraisal theory.Advertisement plays an important role in our life and the range of it is so vast that the thesis only focuses on one kind of the most common commercial advertisements-the Chinese motor vehicle advertisement. And it focused on the language of the advertisement, other aspect like pictures and audio materials in advertisements will not be discussed in the thesis.The researches and discussions in the thesis will focus on the following questions:1. What are the language features of the Chinese motor vehicle advertisement?2. How does the Chinese motor vehicle advertisement construe the empathy and interpersonal function after discourse analysis? How the relationship are built and maintained between the advertiser and the potential customer in the advertisement?3. Which appraisal resources are used more often to achieve the persuasion function of advertisement? And how are they deployed?The thesis presents a discourse-analytical approach to the Chinese motor vehicle advertisement. It utilizes the Appraisal theory's attitude system as the rooted analytical tool and adopts qualitative and quantitative study, choosing some Chinese motor vehicle advertisement discourse samples which are selected from the authoritative and well-known website http://www.motortrend.com.cn/z/2008AutoAD s/ as the analyzing material. Firstly, we make clear how the relationship are built between the advertiser and the potential customer by analyzing the data from the perspective of Attitude, then we analyze the data under the three sub-categories in Attitude system to show how does the Chinese motor vehicle advertisement construe the empathy and interpersonal function. Finally we discuss Which appraisal resources are used more often to achieve the persuasion function of advertisement and how are they deployed.Through the analysis, it is found that the Chinese motor vehicle advertisement usually describe the quality, performance and characteristic of the product in a positive and objective way by using a large amount of attitudinal resources and evaluative language. And we can find that Appreciation resources are much more used than Affect and Judgement resources in the advertisement. They are used to highly praise the motor vehicles in order to arouse the attention of the readers. This thesis applies Attitude to examine what kinds of Attitudes are employed and which Attitudinal resources are foregrounded and how they are realized, aiming to bringing new light for the native motor vehicle advertisement designers to grasping language strategy to attract customers more effectively. The research reveals that Chinese motor vehicle advertisement contains a large amount of Attitudinal resources which are deployed by advertisers in attempt to persuade or entice potential customers to purchase motor vehicles.