On The Realization Of Persuasiveness In FTRs-Based On The Research Of Attitude Resources In The Appraisal Theory

The Fashion Trends Report(FTR),a sub-genre of fashion discourse,draws more and more attention from the public and also plays an increasingly important role in people's life.On the one hand,it informs readers of the latest fashion trends and,on the other,it has great persuasive effect realized by its special language.It invisibly influences the fashion consumption concept and sense of aesthetics of the public and even has a force to tempt readers into buying things mentioned in it.The FTR,like any other genres,inevitably shows or implies the evaluation and stance of the writer.The Appraisal Theory,which takes 'system' as the core and 'Appraisal' as the focus,is a new development of the Systemic-Functional Linguistics(SFL).It is a system of semantic resources to describe and explain the way in which language is used to evaluate,to negotiate and to manage interpersonal relationships.As we can see,there are few studies of FTRs as well as fashion discourses from the perspective of linguistics,and,in particular,the Appraisal Theory has never been used in the research of FTRs.This thesis,with this loophole in view,tries to analyze FTRs from the perspective of the Appraisal Theory.In particular,the author intends to explore the realization of persuasiveness in FTRs from the perspective of the Appraisal Theory, i.e.,to find out how writers make use of Attitude resources to achieve successful persuasion.The data employed in this research are 12 FTRs chosen from the Fashion edition of the newspaper THE TIMES in the year of 2008.With the framework of the Attitude System in the Appraisal Theory,the distributions of attitudinal resources are explored. And some reasonable explanations based on the statistic results are given with the relevance between the choice of attitudinal resources and the realization of persuasiveness examined.Based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of our data,we have mainly arrived at the following findings:1) FTRs contain a large amount of Attitudinal resources.Writers of FTRs realize the persuasion by employing plenty of Attitudinal resources.2) Among all the attitudinal resources in FTRs,Appreciation ranks first, accounting for 79.3%.Affect,second,making up 12.2%,and Judgement,last,taking up 8.5%.Within the Appreciation System,the sub-types of Reaction is fore grounded with a proportion of 47.0%,because the 'quality' and 'impact' of a trend or a look draw more attention from readers and prove to be more persuasive.3) The extensive adoption of explicit Attitude makes it easier to understand the reports,thus the effectiveness of persuasion is greatly improved.However,implicit Attitude values sometimes may exert humor or other special effects.And 4) The extensive adoption of positive evaluation enhances the persuasion of FTRs due to readers' strong desire for beauty and fashion.Besides,positive Affect and negative Affect are inevitably interactive.To some extent,a negative Attitude facilitates the expressiveness of a positive Attitude.We hope that this research will shed some light on the study of fashion discourses and application of the Appraisal Theory and that readers and writers of FTRs can also benefit from our findings.