Study On Interpersonal Meaning In English HR Recruitment Advertisements Based On Appraisal Theory

Recruitment advertisements act as one of the most principal techniques of enterprise recruitment,playing an indispensable role in connecting companies and potential applicants.In the age of internet,the advertising industry has met its new opportunity of development.Therefore,online recruitment advertisements make enterprise recruiting activities much more convenient.The department of human resources,an essential functional department which exists in companies of all kinds,is the most significant strategic division for enterprises to reach excellent work performances.To some extent,the competitions among products and services in different companies can be seen as competitions among their talented employees.Given all that,it is of great significance to study online human resources recruitment advertisements.In previous studies,scholars have analyzed recruitment advertisements from perspectives of stylistics,pragmatics,systemic functional linguistics,and so forth.However,few studies have probed into the application of appraisal theory in recruitment advertisements in a specific field.Thus,under the theoretical framework of three subsystems of appraisal theory proposed by Martin,the thesis selects 50 pieces of online English HR recruitment advertisements posted by Fortune Global 500 within the scope of top two popular professional overseas recruitment websites.It tries to answer the following questions:1)How are these appraisal resources distributed in the discourse of English HR recruitment advertisements?2)What are the appraisal features shown in English HR recruitment advertisements?3)How to interpret the underlying interactions between writers and potentialreaders?The thesis employs both quantitative and qualitative approaches,with the assistance of UAM Corpus Tool to identify and annotate appraisal resources in selected discourses and descriptive statistics automatically produced by the software.Some findings are listed as follows: First,among all three subsystems of appraisal theory,writers of such advertisements are more likely to use attitude resources,followed by graduation resources and engagement resources;Second,as the most prominent features of recruitment advertisements are to release current job vacancies,including job responsibilities and requirements/qualifications,it is essential to create good corporate image,to describe corporate culture and work environment.Thus,in attitude system,more judgment resources are employed,especially capacity resources,followed by valuation resources under appreciation system;Third,in engagement subsystem,writers show a preference for dialogic expansion resources over dialogic contraction resources under heterogloss,in order to construct positive interpersonal relationships between advertising writers and putative readers;Fourth,writers of such advertisements,in graduation subsystem,tend to utilize more force resources with more resources of quantification to modulate strength of diversified attitudes,rather than focus resources,making the advertising languages even more positive.The above-mentioned appraisal features are concluded in the thesis,hoping to make some contribution to the writing of similar recruitment advertisements.