| Persuasion is a social process of semogenisis.Rather than the traditional transference of meaning,persuasion functions as the sediment of both cultural and the situational contexts related,which reflects the language user's persona,intention,and attitude and so on.In business communication,persuasion,as an effective approach,is broadly used in such utterances that seek to elicit compliance,the essence of which is the interaction between participants(Bülow-M?ller 2005).Meanwhile,Appraisal can be used to manipulate the reader,to persuade him or her to look at the things in a particular way(Hunston & Thompson 2000: 8).Appraisal undoubtedly plays its decisive role in helping realize persuasion in the manner of business writing.Hence we may find heaps of appraisal resources in the realm of business correspondence.Thus,Appraisal is naturally crucial to the performance of persuasion,when such a speech act of perlocution is used in business writing.The objective of this research is to investigate into the appraisal resources which are found in abundance in Business English Correspondence(BEC),to explore their functions of persuasion,with the attempt to establish a relatively new model of persuasion to be realized by the appraisal resources,on the basis of the Appraisal Theory developed from the Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL).The model aims at providing an effective access to further discussions on those persuasive discourses such as the genre of BEC with more systemic and comprehensive theoretical support.The methodology adopted in this study is mainly qualitative and explanatory with the support of data analyses.The persuasive strategy through appraisal in this framework is elaborative with a view to probing into the processes and the targeted materials from down to top,that is,from the stratum of discourse semantics to register and genre,and from the perspective of the language user to the language in use in a dynamic context.BEC materials in this respect are assembled with 35 authentic and matter-of-fact letters selected at random from the websites of those enterprises enlisted on the Fortune Global 500 List in the year of 2013.We choose the top 70 companies located in America on the Fortune Rich List,label them in order by number,and then pick up from among them these 35 ones marked with the odd numbers as our final objective;we hope that this sampling should bear certain statistical value.These business letters written by the CEOs of the world famous enterprises to their shareholders and customers are born with typical significance since they have clear and specified goals which concern the shared interests of multi-facets,and they contain abundant appraisal resources and are highly persuasive as an inspiration aiming to enhance the cohesiveness among their work-forces and to build up their investors and cooperators confidence in them and thereby to stimulate all the companies' supporters,thus they can be presumably viewed as representation of the formal genre of BEC.We intend totake these 35 business letters selected randomly as a case study,and have them compiled as a small data bank for conducting both diachronic and synchronic analyses,examining the operational appraisal resources scattered in them and their working mechanism of persuasion,with the view to elucidating and bringing light into the generic features and patterns as well as the guiding principles in the genre of BEC.It has been found that BEC,as a specific genre of discourse bearing its own distinctive business and economic goals to be realized through persuasion,is a rich in appraisal resources,but these resources are not evenly distributed in those 35 business English letters we have selected as samples for our discussion.Our surveys show that in the selected passages there are altogether 923 Attitude resources,147 Engagement resources and 743 Graduation resources at the semantic level of the language strata.Through the analyses,we have found that each scheme of the appraisal resources has its own respective persuasive share.With respect to Attitude resources,we can see that Capacity of Social Esteem under the category of Judgment and Valuation of Appreciation are the foregrounded types of Attitude resources,which constitutes the largest proportion.The overwhelming quantity of the positive explicit Capacity and Valuation resources manifest the fact that the language users of business writers have an inclination of setting up their “competence face” by the strong Personae appealing,showing the language users' intention to demonstrate their own capable,credible and reliable personality.These Attitudinal resources exist in three patterns of prosody,namely,saturation,intensification and domination.The appraisal resources resonate with each other in the form of saturating prosody,and cumulatively progress in the form of intensifying prosody,and then propagate from the dominant clause to the whole text in the form of dominating prosody.With regard to Engagement resources,we have discussed Entertain,Attribution,Deny,Counter and Concur,which occur more frequently than others.Deny,Counter and Concur belong to Dialogic contraction under Engagement.Monogloss and Dialogic contraction can help build language user's powerful and competence image,by way of Disclaim leading to Logical appealing and Proclaim to Personae appealing respectively.Accordingly,Engagement of Dialogic expansion can consolidate language user's solidarity with the readers through both Entertain and Attribution achieving Personae appealing.Finally,Graduation grades the Force and Focus of the appraisal resources,hence embellishes and polishes all the persuasive effect of the language in use.Through the exploration we have arrived at our tentative conclusions that the appraisal resources under the context of Tenor,Field and Mode at register stratum can efficiently achieve the two standards of business communication targets,which are,the creation of negotiator persona and the creation of the common ground(Bülow-M?ller2005).By changing the appraisal resources and other linguistics factors,such as technical words,affectionate titles,nicknames,slang and so on,language user's persona including “solidarity”,“competence” and “powerful” face,positive andnegative face,can be construed.It is discovered that,being a mode of action of giving and demanding goods-and-services and information,clauses can help writers to build up the informational,affectional and logical common ground with the readers.Besides,the ideational meaning which composes the main part of Field,can afford implicit appraisal,through which readers can be persuaded unconsciously.The waves of information can be managed to insinuate into the periodic structure.Information in periodicity gives the readers some ideas about what to expect,henceforth leading them to fulfill those expectations,and then to review them.The alteration of the appraisal resources' location in clauses can bring about disparate persuasion effect.As it is shown,both the hyperTheme and macroTheme can spread the explicit appraisal,while both the hyperNew and macroNew can reflect the explicit appraisal in the shape of periodicity.Thus,the persuasiveness is carried forward layer upon layer.Since BEC is a visual,one-way mode of communication,the appraisal resources can operate to achieve the diversified persuasive effect when they are implemented to perform their textual metafunction in the organization of the discourse of BEC.This study proposes three kinds of evaluative cohesion and two kinds of evaluative metaphor.The former consists of evaluative reference,evaluative substitution and evaluative conjunction,and the latter contains evaluative metaphor of categories and evaluative metaphor of polarity.Evaluative cohesion can contribute to the fluency of the textual metafunction,while evaluative metaphor can express the opposite attitude,which can help to achieve persuasion by way of a roundabout route.Through coupling and re-commitment of the meanings,iconization(Martin 2010)connects both the explicit and implicit resources,which creates the necessary bonds between the writers and the readers.The bonds,the common grounds and the shared communities are the prerequisite conditions and the very essence for achieving the ultimate goals of persuasion in the genre of BEC.It is found that the selection and configuration of certain appraisal resources display a certain pattern rather than being totally random in different stages of BEC discourses' generic structures.Our surveys show that Capacity of Judgment subsystem and Valuation of Appreciation resources comprise an overwhelming proportion of all stages in generic structures of the selected business letters.The Happiness resources of Affect occur comparatively higher in both Stage AR and Stage FP,while the Satisfaction resources of Affect are mainly distributed in Stage OI.The appearance of Dialogic expansion resources is more frequent than those of Dialogic contraction in almost all stages except for Stage AR.As an independent genre,BEC bears its specific goals on commercial communication,which exist in each of its stages in generic structure.It is believed that the choices of the appraisal resources are essentially embodied by the interpersonal relation that the writers expect to build with their readers of the business letters.The varieties of the selections of these appraisal resources in each stage of generic structure are confined by the communicative purposes of that stage.The reason for the writers who are in favor of exploiting the Happiness resources in Stage AR and Stage FP lies in that they intend to create an easy,happy and attractive atmosphere at the beginning of the letters.Stage OI shows their favors in using the Satisfaction resources,which reflects the writers' highlights on their satisfaction for their companies' products,excellent relationships with the investors and the optimistic attitude for their companies' prosperous future in order to attract more cooperative relations.From a holistic perspective,Engagement resources of Dialogic expansion occur more frequently than those of Dialogic contraction,which manifests the writers' emphasis on their images of being tolerant,reasonable and broad-minded.This linguistic phenomenon is also closely related with the business writers' communicative goals on profitability.Dialogic expansion resources can assist the language users to show their companies' positive attitude of expanding the circle of business acquaintances and involvement of more customers and investors.Besides,the only stage in which the resources of Dialogic contraction outnumber that of Dialogic expansion is Stage AR.This phenomenon reflects the writers' inclination of using Dialogic contraction resources to control the dialogic power,and simultaneously implement Personae appealing by promoting their images of being decisive as the companies' leaders.Language users' personae are diversified as a result of individuation through the semogenic process of persuasion.We have come to realize that the appraisal resources in BEC are from different evaluative voices.Evaluative responsibilities are also called to in hierarchical degrees according to the prestige,identity and many other factors of the evaluative voices.Through our investigation into the appraisal resources and their persuasive functions exhibited in the sampled letters in the genre of BEC,the theoretical implications can be illustrated in the following three aspects:Firstly,it is a comparatively in-depth discussion on the functions of the appraisal resources operating to realize the ultimate goals of persuasion in the genre of BEC,which we hope can be viewed as a supplementary contribution to the functional linguistic study of the business discourses and other types of persuasive texts in this regard.We have analyzed the distinctive features of the appraisal resources in business English letters,including the sources of these appraisal resources,their targets,and their distribution patterns on the discourse semantic stratum of BEC.Meanwhile,we have discussed the features of implicit resources' application under the context of genre and register.Beside,due to their commercial purposes for profitability,business English letters distinguish themselves with other kinds of texts on the generic characteristics.Thus,we have also launched our discussion on the appraisal resources' distribution in different stages in generic structures and the reasons for the formation of their patterns.It is our sincere hope that this research is of certain economic and pragmatic value and our findings are worthwhile and rewarding since the studies in this respect have never been exhausted and what is more,there have been few of the previous studies that give sufficient attention to and concentrate on the functional linguistic analyses on the appraisal resources systemically with respect to the genre ofBEC,which is one of the very important dimensions in today's ever more changing and challenging economic and business world.Secondly,through discussions on the operational functions of those persuasive devices in the genre of BEC from the appraisal perspective,this research project extends the practical application of the Appraisal Theory based upon the SFL to certain new genres and areas.Appraisal,though frequently touched upon in discourse studies,is not yet sufficiently expounded as a special functional group in context.This study reveals some of the appraisal features of persuasion in the related contexts.The features being analyzed also include the appraisers and the objects of the appraisal,the coordination between the explicit and the implicit,the positive and the negative,evaluative cohesion,evaluative metaphor and evaluative responsibility,as well as their persuasive effect.We therefore sincerely hope that these findings could be of certain value for theoretical references and pragmatically applicable in the related research areas.Thirdly,the present study provides a relatively new and comprehensive model of persuasion analysis from the perspective of Appraisal Theory in SFL as the theoretical foundation.It reveals the appraisal features characterizing persuasion in context.Meanwhile,it is,to some extent,a meaningful exploration into the way the appraisal resources operate to lead to the realization of persuasion in the manner of persuasive assortments such as Emotional appealing,Logical appealing,language users' Personae appealing,etc.in terms of Tenor,Mode,and Field as well.Through the analyses conducted in our study,we have been fully aware of the fact that the theories and hypotheses of metafunctions,APPRAISAL and Context in SFL also have their interpretive capacity and guiding force in the genre of persuasive discourses.This study has provided certain linguistic evidence for the complicated power and interest construction in business communication and certain theoretical support for the target-oriented business writing practices.There is no denial that the adoption of the appropriate appraisals can help the language users to persuade the receptors to better accept their views so as to organize their companies more efficiently as well as gaining more competitiveness for better cooperation and management of their human resources in the trend of market globalization. |
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