| In the past decade, there have been an increasing number of studies on academic writing conducted in the fields of applied linguistics. As the rapid development of academic communication, the essential part of academic articles, abstract, has also been given more concerns. Consequently, many manuals have been published to instruct the standardized writing of abstracts (O'Connor and Woodford 1976; Day 1998; Slade 2000). Meanwhile, some researchers made descriptive studies on the structural and linguistic features of abstracts within such disciplines as genre analysis and stylistics (Graetz 1985; Swales 1990). Moreover, some cross-cultural or cross-linguistic researches have been conducted (Melander et al. 1997). However, the previous researches investigated abstracts mainly from the perspective of genre analysis, neglecting the communicative nature of an abstract as a kind of discourse. The thesis focuses on the construing of the interpersonal meaning in abstracts of academic journal articles within the framework of Appraisal Theory.Appraisal Theory, proposed and developed by Martin and White in the late 1990s, is a comprehensive framework for the analysis of interpersonal meaning. The theory is a set of subsystems which gives language users choice in terms of how they appraise, grade, and give value to social experience. Since its proposal, the theory has been applied to such discourse domains as mass media and historical texts. Some applicable researches indicate that the theory is an effective tool for discourse analysis. However, there are still many discourse domains to which the theory has not been applied, abstract being one of them.The present study focuses on abstracts of research articles published in journals, leaving out other kinds of abstracts such as abstracts of meeting articles, and abstracts of dissertations. In order to avoid variation caused by disciplinary differences, 30 abstracts in this study are all randomly collected from five English linguistic journals, i.e. Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, Applied Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, and ELT Journal, which publish articles concerning almost all disciplines of theoretical and applied linguistics.Based on the 30 abstracts of English linguistic journals, the study has been designed to explore the following three questions within the framework of Appraisal Theory.(1) What are the distributions of the three subsystems of Appraisal Theory and the distributions of the subcategories of each subsystem in abstracts?(2) How are these appraisal resources realized in abstracts?(3) Is the use of the appraisal resources contradictory to the objective demand of abstracts?Data analysis indicates that appraisal resources are pervasive in abstracts. The three subsystems of Appraisal Theory, i.e. Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, are different in their distributions in abstracts. The use of Attitude is more frequent than that of Engagement and Graduation. Within each subsystem, distributions of their subcategories are uneven. Meanwhile, the subsystems and the subcategories of the appraisal resources are realized by various lexical or grammatical ways. Finally, there is compatibility between the subjectivity of appraisal resources and the objectivity of abstracts.The study is of great theoretical and practical significance. It will not only testify the applicability of Appraisal Theory, but also shed light on the teaching and writing of valid English abstracts.
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