The Interpersonal Meaning In The Introduction Of Legal Research Journal Articles From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

With the increase of international exchange, English for Specific Purpose (ESP)gains unprecedented attention. As a special ESP, legal English are also paid more andmore attention in the recent years. At the same time, a lot of scholars have done someresearch on legal English, but almost no one has involved the research on researchjournal articles of legal English. In addition, the introduction is a special discoursewhich has its own unique characteristics in the paper. And the research on theintroduction mainly focuses on genre analysis and special words, while quite few peoplekeep an eye on its interpersonal meaning at present. However, Martin’s appraisal theoryis one of fundamental theories supporting interpersonal meaning; taking thecharacteristics of introductions into consideration, this thesis will applies engagementresource of Martin’s appraisal theory (2005) to analyze the interpersonal meaning of theintroduction of legal research journal articles.The data of this thesis is collected from articles of the five internationalauthoritative law journals: Harvard International Law Journal, The Yale Journal ofInternational Law, Michigan Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review,Stanford Law Review. The author will randomly draw24articles from each journal,120articles in all, and then employ the introductions of120articles to establish a smallcorpus, which has135,697words in all. Next, based on the constituent of engagementresource, the collected data will be annotated. Then, Microsoft Wordsmith will beadopted to draw these annotations. Last, combining the characteristics of theintroduction and obtained data, the interpersonal meaning of the introduction will beanalyzed and studied.By analyzing the collected data, the author concludes the follwing findings on legalresearch journal articles:(1) the frequency of heterogloss is much higher than that ofmonogloss;(2) in heterogloss, dialogic expansion is more than dialogic contraction, butthe gap is not big;(3) entertain in dialogic expansion and disclaim in dialogiccontraction has much weight and takes up the top two places in the heteroglossicresource;(4) however, the weight of attribute and proclaim is quite little. In researchjournal articles, the use of interpersonal meaning does not violate the objectivity. Fromthe above conclusions, it can be seen that the authors have the preference to adoptentertain and disclaim in the introduction of legal research journal articles. On the one hand, in order to respect readers, the authors allow different views on a proposition; onthe other hand, when the authors respect previous views, they need to state out theirown ideas firmly.This study not only expands the scope which appraisal theory researches but also ishelpful for law scholars to understand how the interpersonal meaning is realized in theintroduction of legal research journal articles, to read foreign literature better and towrite introductions with high quality so as to publish articles in the internationalauthoritative law journal.