An Appraisal Study Of English Commercial Advertisement

Nowadays, commercial advertisement can be found everywhere in our daily lives.The most important function of advertisement is to present some useful information toits audience, and then to arouse a purchasing desire for new products or services. As akind of persuasive discourse, lots of systemic researches are made from different fields,such as cultural linguistic, rhetoric, psychology and so on. However, very little study ismade within Appraisal theory.Appraisal theory was first proposed by Jim Martin. As a complement of SFL,Appraisal theory concerns those linguistic resources which are used to reveal anindividual’s standpoint on certain matters. Appraisal theory concludes three sub-systems,which are named as Attitude, Engagement and Graduation respectively. Each of themalso has its own framework. Nowadays, Appraisal theory is used in the analysis ofdifferent kinds of discourse, but little in advertisements. As an informative discourse,commercial advertisement contains a lot of evaluative resources, which gives us somepossibilities to this study.Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to give a tentative study on the feature ofcommercial advertisement language within the framework of Appraisal system. In thisthesis, three questions need to be answered:(1) How are these appraisal resources distributed in the English commercialadvertisements?(2) Why are these appraisal resources distributed in this way?(3) How do these appraisal resources manage to arouse potential consumer’sinterest?To answer these three questions, the author sets up a corpus which contains50English commercial advertisements. Within50selected samples,20samples are chosenfrom TIME (from October2013to May2014),20from Newsweek (from December2013to April2014) and the other ten are selected from Automobile EngineeringInternational in2004. In this study, the author will use both qualitative and quantitativemethods.After gathering all these samples, the author firstly labeled all these appraisalvalues in certain ways. Secondly, with the help of AntConc3.2.0, the distribution ofeach sub-system will be presented. Finally, the author will try to find out reasons for different distributions in sub-systems.This research concludes that:1) There are plenty appraisal resources in the50selected English commercial advertisements, and the distribution and frequency areunbalanced within attitude, engagement and graduation.2) Within attitude system,appreciation value, which accounts for83.72%, far exceeds affect value and judgmentvalue.3) Among two sub-systems in engagement, the frequency of monogloss is muchhigher than heterogloss for a better realization of persuasion.4) Within Graduation, thedistribution of force and focus is quite unequal—force (86.6%) is much higher thanfocus (13.4%).The significances of this paper are listed as follows:1) This thesis manages to reveal how advertising managers show their attitude inadvertisement, which can provide some helpful information for both advertisers andreaders.2) The theoretical significance of this study is the finding of the distribution ofdifferent evaluative resources in the commercial advertisement. In this way, we canconclude with some distinct features in English commercial advertisement.