An Analysis Of Appraisal Resources In Online Travel Reviews Based On Appraisal Theory

In recent years,with the rapid development of the economy and modern information technology,people’s living standards have continued to improve,and tourism consumption has gradually increased in proportion to people’s living consumption.More and more tourists are sharing information and acquiring resources through online platforms.Thus a new online communication method and platform have been developed.Online reviews have gradually become an important external factor affecting consumer decisions.Correspondingly,online travel reviews express the feelings and attitudes of travel consumers about the places they visit and provide a reference for potential travel consumers.Therefore,online travel reviews have great linguistic research value.This thesis attempts to study online travel reviews from the aspect of appraisal theory.As a new development of systematic functional linguistics,appraisal theory is focusing on interpersonal meaning,which examines the semantics of evaluation,including people’s feelings,judgments,and their value judgments on things.There are three major subsystems in the appraisal theory,including the engagement system,attitude system and graduation system.This thesis collects a total of 150 online travel reviews from the world’s leading travel website Trip Advisor and uses them as a corpus.Under the guidance of Martin’s appraisal theory,the author analyzes and unfolds this research via the UAM corpus analysis tool from a qualitative and quantitative perspective,revealing the distribution characteristics of appraisal resources in online travel reviews and the realization of interpersonal meaning.Based on the research purposes and significance,three research questions are listed as follows:1)How the different appraisal resources are applied in online travel reviews?2)what are the characteristics among various appraisal resources’ distributions and frequencies?3)How do travelers use appraisal resources in online travel reviews to convey interpersonal meaning?After detailed exploring,the significant findings can be concluded: firstly,online travel reviews include multiple appraisal resources,and the frequency and distribution of these appraisal resources are not balanced.Among them,attitude resources are the highest,accounting for 46% of all appraisal resources because attitude resources can achieve emotional appeal to achieve persuasive purposes,followed by those of engagement resources,accounting for 29% and graduation resources rank the last accounting for 22%.Besides,there exist differences among the sub-categories of each sub-system.Secondly,online travel reviews can realize the interpersonal meaning.By writing reviews,online travel reviews can express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the attractions they have been to.Meanwhile,they try to establish interactive relationships with potential travel consumers,thereby affecting their travel decisions.The exploration of appraisal resources in online travel reviews not only expands the application scope of appraisal theory but also offers individual suggestions for tourism e-commerce platforms to improve services and decisionmaking of potential tourism consumers.