A Study On The English Commercial Advertising Discourse

Appraisal theory, first introduced by linguist Martin in the early 1990s, is a theoretical system used to describe and explain language use. It is a new lexical-grammatical frame developing from the research of interpersonal meaning. According to Martin and White (2005), evaluation is used to express speakers'or writers'opinions and viewpoints, and by so doing to reflect the value system of those persons and their community. In other words, the theory chiefly explores the ways speakers or writers use appraisal values to express their attitude, judgment and appreciation towards target things, and the way of realizing interaction with hearers or readers and finally achieving the purpose of persuasion. The theory makes analysis of appraisal utterances from level of lexical, language other than level of grammar. In Martin's analysis, Appraisal theory is categorized into three subsystems: the system of attitude, together with parallel system of graduation (which fine-tunes the meaning) and engagement (which manages dialogism). As central parts in appraisal framework, attitudes are values by which speakers pass judgments and associate emotional/affectual responses with participants and processes. Attitude can be further divided into affect judgment and appreciation. Engagement refers to the diverse range of resources by which speakers/writers adjust and negotiate the arguability of what they say or write. Graduation is concerned with values which scale other meanings along two possible parameters—either locating them on a scale from low to high intensity or from core to marginal membership of a category.In recent years, the English commercial advertisement has been attracting much attention of researchers. Many a worthwhile studies in this genre have been carried out from diverse perspectives of linguistics. However, few studies are made from the perspective of Appraisal theory. Within the basic framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Appraisal theory, this study intends to conduct an evaluation analysis of the English commercial advertising discourse, with an attempt to explore the preference of appraisal resources by advertisers and how these preferring resources are employed to realize the communicative function and the interaction between writers and readers. A corpus of 30 English commercial advertisements selected from advertising courses or from local supermarkets is established. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted to analyze the 30 sample advertisements and some tentative research findings have been discovered in this study.Firstly, there are rich appraisal resources in the corpus, and the distribution features of its three subsystems are varied. The frequency of Attitude is the highest among the three, with an account of 54.57%, whereas Engagement and Graduation only account for a half of the total appraisal resources. Moreover, the distribution of the subcategories of each subsystem is uneven.Secondly, as far as the Attitude subsystem is concerned, the finding is that attitudinal meaning of Appreciation (36.7%) is substantially used other than Affect (10.7%).or judgment (7.1%). Although the options of judgment resources only account for a small part, they open up the space for negotiation between advertisers and potential consumers and reveal the dialogic nature of advertising discourse. Affect values are also indispensable in this kind of discourse, though they only accounts for a very small proportion.Thirdly, as for the Engagement subsystem, the study finds that most of the English commercial advertisements are written in the monoglossic way with little appearance of heteroglossic options in the discourse, which should be attributed to the persuasive function of the commercial advertisement and its linguistic features of being terse and brief. Another finding is that dialogistic contraction (15.72%) is much preferred to dialogistic expansion (8.57%) in managing heteroglossic space. Fourthly, concerning Graduation subsystem, it is found that the two subcategories within Graduation are distributed in an unbalanced proportion in the English commercial advertisement—force (18.57%) is employed much more frequently than focus (2.57%). Furthermore, most of the graduation resources are used in situations in which force-raising and focus-sharpening (grading up) are more often used while force-lowering or focus-softening cases are few. This is attributed to the persuasive function of commercial advertisements and attests to Martin and Rose's hypothesis (2003) that in using English, people seems to have more resources for turning the volume up than turning it down.This appraisal analysis of English commercial advertisements will not only improve the applicability of the Appraisal theory to discourse analysis and are beneficial to commercial advertisers and potential consumers for the interpretation of this kind of advertisements, and will also provide some constructive nudges for the teaching of English reading and writing of commercial advertising discourse.