| This dissertation investigates interpersonal resources that instructed, advanced L2 writers of German employ in expressing attitude and stance across the personal letter genre. Drawing on Martin & White's (2005) 'appraisal' framework, fictive letters written by 21 advanced L2 and 9 L1 writers of German were analyzed. Independent, holistic assessment of the corpus further helped to establish the perceived success of the texts and gauge relative effectiveness of evaluative strategies.;Quantitative analyses revealed more frequent use of appraisal features in L1 than L2 texts, yet similar ratios of appraisal values among the LI and L2 writers in terms of positive to negative values, attitudinal categories, degree of explicitness, and heteroglossic engagement resources.;To determine the prototypical evaluative linguistic forms across the letter genre, a 'moves analysis' was conducted. Generic stages emerging from the data coalesced into three main functions of the writing task: moves that 'frame' the personal letter, stages aligned to the needs of a condolence letter, and embedded genres, e.g., stories, located within the letter's 'body' to relay and respond to news.;Descriptive analyses of evaluative features focused on the role appraisal patterns play in realizing the communicative purposes of the letter's moves. For the letter-framing stages, evaluative language helped to create and maintain shared knowledge between writer and reader. For the condolence stages, emotive language served to mark ritual participation and individual sincerity. For the letter's body, where diverse genres were taken up to accomplish communicative goals germane to the task, analysis addressed most directly the historical context of the task, World War I1 Germany, and examined evaluative resources L1 and L2 writers draw on to position actors as perpetrators and/or victims of the Holocaust.;The analyses revealed certain challenges for advanced L2 (letter) writers: (1) the difficulty in navigating centripetal and centrifugal tensions within the personal letter genre, especially regarding conventionalized emotive language and marked forms signifying an individual voice; (2) interpretation of the specific text type elicited in the writing task, e.g., condolence letter vs. letter of apology; and (3) the challenge of managing multiple voices (cf. heteroglossia) called for in complex personal letter writing. |
