A Study On Attitude Resources Of President’s Welcome Messages Of American Universities

The President’s Welcome Message is an important component of the homepage of a university’s official website.Briefly introducing the university to prospective students,the President’s Welcome Message contains the information about campus environment,infrastructure,the teaching staff,teaching qualities and scientific research level,school characteristics,development programs,etc.The main purpose of the President’s Welcome Message is to publicize the strengths and characteristics of the university as well as to attract students from all over the world.In order to achieve these goals,the President’s Welcome Message is supposed to be abundant in attitude resources.At present,researches on President’s Welcome Messages at home and abroad are still few and far between,let alone researches on President’s Welcome Messages within the framework of Appraisal Theory.In view of this,an analysis of President’s Welcome Messages under the guidance of Appraisal Theory constitutes not only an expanded application of Appraisal Theory,but also a further exploration on the linguistic peculiarities of President’s Welcome Messages from a new perspective.This thesis,based on Attitude System of Appraisal Theory,adopting the qualitative and quantitative research methods,conducts an analysis of the attitude resources in the President’s Welcome Messages of American Universities:In this study,the author selects twenty President’s Welcome Messages of American Universities as corpus.First of all,the author manually labels and calculates all the attitude resources deployed in the samples in a quantitative method.Secondly,based on the distribution of attitude resources,the author conducts a detailed analysis on these attitude resources from the following aspects: the overall distribution of attitude resources,the distribution of the three sub-categories of attitude resources,the distribution of positive attitude and negative attitude,and the distribution of inscribed attitude and invoked attitude.Finally,the author analyzes typical examples in the twenty samples in a qualitative method,so that light can be shed on how university Presidents use attitude resources to achieve their persuasion purposes.The findings of this research can be briefly summarized as follows:1.The Presidents of American universities tend to use a large number of positive and inscribed attitude resources to convey interpersonal meaning in their President’s Welcome Messages,in which judgment resources(48.8%)account for the largest proportion,appreciation resources(36.3%)rank second,and affect resources(14.9%)are the least.2.Within judgment resources,social esteem(90.3%)overwhelmingly overweighs social sanction(9.7%);within appreciation resources,valuation(66.1%)ranks first,followed by reaction(25.1%)and composition(8.8%);within affect resources,the frequencies of happiness(38.7%)and inclination(38.7%)are the highest,while the frequencies of security(13.3%)and satisfaction(9.3%)are comparatively lower.3.University presidents are inclined to use attitude resources to demonstrate their universities’ strengths and forge close relationships with their website visitors,so as to achieve the effect of persuasion.