The Realization Of Persuasive Function In Initial Written Proposal—from The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Initial Written Proposal as a common writing style is widely used in daily life. It is a special type of letter written and launched by an individual or a group of people with the hope of accomplishing a certain task or carrying out a public activity. It describes and evaluates a phenomenon or an event to evoke the sympathy and sense of responsibility of people. It leads the readers to understand and accept the writer's stance put forward in the discourse, and thus encourages the readers to take action as the writer suggests and demands. In other words, Initial Written Proposal is used to persuade people to take action as the writer suggests and this function is called persuasion. Like any other type of discourse, Initial Written Proposal inevitably involves the attitude and the stance of the writer.Appraisal theory, which takes'system'as the core and'Appraisal'as the focus, is a new development of Halliday's SFL. It is concerned with the linguistic resources by which the writer/speaker can express their attitude, get involved in propositions, and grade the assessments of meanings. Appraisal is divided into three sub-systems: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Under each sub-system, several sub-categories are defined. Moreover, as we know that there are few studies of Initial Written Proposal from the aspect of Appraisal and Martin has shown his wish in applying Appraisal to Chinese to extend the feasibility of this theory, the thesis will explore the realization of persuasive function in Chinese Initial Written Proposal with Appraisal as the theoretical basis.30 Chinese Initial Written Proposals chosen from Red Cross website, Sina and Netease are collected as the data. Within the framework of Appraisal, quantitative research is done to explore the distribution of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation resources and qualitative research is done to identify the writer preferred language choices and the way to realize his/her persuading purposes.The findings of this thesis are as follows: 1) Initial Written Proposals contain a large amount of Appraisal resources and the choice of Appraisal resources plays a significant role in the realization of persuasion. 2) The writers of Initial Written Proposals tend to employ Attitudinal resources and Engagement resources rather than Graduation resources. Among all the Appraisal resources, Attitudinal ranks first, accounting for 78.9%. Engagement, second, making up 19.2% while Graduation, last, taking up only1.9%. 3) Among the Attitudinal resources, plenty of Appreciation resources (accounting for 54.3% in Attitudinal resources) are used to evoke the sympathy and understanding between the readers and the writers. Another significant thing that involved is most Appreciation resources are negative. The reason is that the writer inclines to describe the negative effect of an object or a phenomenon so as to draw the attention of the readers. 4) There are totally 101 Engagement resources among which proclaim accounts for 63.4%, playing a significant role in negotiating with the potential readers. Entertain and disclaim account for the same proportion (both 16.8%) while attribute is the least in proportion, only 10% among 101 Engagement values.After a detailed analysis and discussion, we are able to draw a series of implications. Firstly, the negative appraisal resources used in Initial Written Proposal could better arise the sympathy of the readers thus are more persuasive. Secondly, this research provides some suggestions on Initial Written Proposal writing which enable the learners to choose the appropriate language in realizing persuasion.