Towards A Functional Grammar Of Persuasion In The Promotional Genre Colony

The objective of classical rhetoric lies in the demarcation, categorization and analysis of persuasive elements from the multitude of human discourses; among the amalgam of many perspectives in New Rhetoric, in spite of the spread of rhetoric from its original habitat in the world of direct vocal exchange into newly created areas of discourses, the common focus is still on persuasion. The present consensus is that rhetoric must be of interdisciplinary quality, of heteroglossic feature, that rhetoric must be the exploration of contemporary practices of genres and discourses. In the above contexts, this dissertation assimilates, investigates and develops Burkology in New Rhetoric, the genre-based view of discourse analysis, and the newly founded Appraisal theory in Systemic Functional Grammar, to firstly, construct a multidisciplinary philosophical model of persuasion, then theoretically and experimentally, to explore the functional grammatical patterns and modes of that model in the members of the Promotional Genre Colony.Theoretically, through constructing an interdisciplinary text analysis framework and then probing into the practices of authentic text data across different domains, this dissertation attempts to find the systemic, functional and socio-cognitive rationale and paradigms of persuasion in the English Promotional Genre Colony; and pedagogically, this dissertation is supposed to provide insights and resources for ESP and EAP teaching and research.In Part One, a very general explanation of the origins and objectives, terminologies, data rationales, theoretical sources and methodology of this study, is provided in Chapter 1, as an overall framing of this study.Chapters 2 and 3, as literature reviews, position this study of persuasion in diachronic and synchronic interdisciplinary landscapes. Besides relating this present study to other works in rhetoric, genre theory and functionalism theory of evaluation, these two chapters make a critical survey of those related studies, pointing out the gaps in which this dissertation is promised to fill.Part Two provides the theoretical rationale construction. The interdisciplinary rationale construction means that it is addressed progressively through a number of chapters in this dissertation. In Chapter 4, Burkology in New Rhetoric is investigated and...