A Generic Study Of English Commercial Advertising-From The Perspective Of Appraisal System

English commercial advertising (ECA) plays an increasingly important role in business. There has been an enormous upsurge of interest in linguistic features of advertising over the past two decades. However, only analyzing the linguistic features of ECA is far from enough. The present paper attempts to explore the generic structure and the appraisal resources of ECA within the framework of Genre theory and Appraisal theory.Based on Swales' CARS model, Bhatia's move model as well as Hasan's notion of Generic Structure Potential (GSP), the study works out the generic structure and GSP of 30 English commercial advertising discourses and investigates what linguistic elements are used to reveal the features and realize the communicative purposes of ECA.After analyzing the 30 samples of advertisements which are selected randomly from New York Times, Reader's Digest, and A Practical on English Advertising, the author identifies the communicative purposes of ECA: to inform customers about goods or services that they need to know; to attract customers' attention and arouse their interest; to establish credibility and promote good impressions; to persuade customers to purchase the advertised goods or services; to serve as a communicating channel. The communicative purposes mainly determine the generic structure of ECA, which typically includes: Arousing attention or awareness (AA); Establishing credentials (EC); Introducing the offer in detail (IO); Celebrity endorsement/opinions from satisfied customers (CE/OSC); Information of directions (ID); Soliciting responses (SR). In accordance with Hasan's notion of GSP, the author finds out that AA, EC, IO, and SR are the obligatory elements which define ECA, while CE and ID are optional ones. All of the six moves occur in a certain sequence according to specific situations.The research goes further to probe into the distribution and frequency of the appraisal resources by employing appraisal theory. According to the statistics, the author concludes: (1) IO and SR contain most appraisal resources while AA holds the least. (2) Each move is quite similar in the distributive features of appraisal resources: the systems of attitude and graduation are most frequently used in all the six moves; however, the system of engagement is seldom employed. In the system of attitude, the advertisers mainly utilize appreciation to deliver and negotiate their attitudes, but they almost don't use judgment. Authorial affect is hardly employed and non-authorial affect is sparingly resorted to. In graduation system, the strength of evaluation is controlled by grading resources, which intensify or lessen the evaluation to the desired level so as to make ECA objective. The advertisers tend to strengthen the attitudinal and other semantic resources, and highlight the advantages of the advertised goods or services with the help of raise and sharpen. In engagement system, English commercial advertisements on the whole are seen as monogloss ones with advertisers as the main source. However, on some occasions, other voices are introduced in order to create dialogues within discourses.The study is aimed at a better understanding of interpersonal relationships between advertisers and customers and some constructive suggestions on the teaching of ECA.