| The increasingly fast expansion of the English discourse community has outlined the importance of English academic discourse. Nowadays, most of the research articles and academic works published each year are written in English. Meanwhile, with a mounting number of English learners at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels all over the world, English has already become an international language, which attracts linguists' attention to academic discourse to a large extent. Academic discourse is an umbrella term for a rich variety of sub-discourses, such as research articles, conference paper, academic speech, M.A. thesis, Ph.D. thesis, academic reports and ESL or EFL writings, etc. Linguists and discourse analysts approach academic discourses from different perspectives. Some of the past research concerning the academic discourse centers on the ideational and textual functions of language, while other studies explore the generic structures of academic discourse. Studies on interpersonal orientation of academic discourse are seen sporadically in the field.Appraisal theory is developed by the Sydney School led by J. R. Martin on the basis of Systemic Functional Grammar in the 1990s. It can be seen as a reasonable extension of the interpersonal metafunction vertically and horizontally. This theory strongly emphasizes the research of the semantics of evaluation and inter-subjective positioning on the plane of lexis, compensating the weakness Systemic Functional Grammar in this respect. This thesis draws on the theoretical basis of Systemic Functional Grammar and extends the interpersonal function to the Appraisal theory. A formulation and development of the Appraisal theory are elaborated first and then a detailed introduction of the three sub-systems of the Appraisal theory, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, is accomplished. Moreover, we try to decode how the appraisal resources help construct the whole discourse appropriately and effectively.This thesis selects 10 Literature and another 10 Biology Ph.D. theses randomly from the ProQuest Dissertation Full Text Digital Corpus for appraisal analysis. Besides, we take Swales' (1990) CARS model of research article and Bunton's (2002) revised version of CARS model for Ph.D. thesis as our theoretical basis to analyze and compare the generic structures of biology and literature Ph. D. theses introduction sections. Drawing on the Appraisal theory, this paper aims at analyzing how the Ph. D. candidates distribute interpersonal resources in different "moves" and how they combine them as a whole. As text unfolds, various features of different stages of the text as a result of different combinations of appraisal resources foreground the particular stance of the appraiser and sufficiently demonstrate the gradual alternation of the inter-subjective position in the text. With detailed analysis of the Ph. D. theses, this thesis investigates how the Ph. D. candidates construct rhetorical strategy by means of appraisal resources, and how they align with their readers so as to uncover the deep-rooted relation between the combination of appraisal resources, the progression of the rhetorical strategy and the structure of genre.By approaching each "move" of the discourse from the perspectives of Attitude and Engagement, we find out that Literature and Biology Ph. D. theses have their own way of distributing appraisal resources. Although both of them encode Attitude as Appreciation most frequently, they show a great difference in choosing Appreciation resources. Literature Ph. D. thesis prefers to encode Appreciation as Valuation while Biology thesis encodes Appreciation as Reaction. Besides, Literature and Biology theses employ different Engagement patterns and especially different combinations of heteroglossic resources. Both of them contribute to the gradual evolvements of their respective inter-subjective positioning and the overall rhetorical strategies catering for the expectations of their respective discourse communities and target readers.
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