The Construction Of Writer-Reader Interaction In Business English Letters: From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Business English letter, as the major means in business communication, has aroused great interest of scholars who have conducted many researches from different perspectives. However, these studies rarely pay attention to the construction of interpersonal interaction between the writer and the reader.Appraisal theory, is concerned with the social function of the Appraisal resources. It acts as the effective means through which the writers express their attitudes, take a particular stance, engage with various value positions and negotiate with the readers, thus interacting with readers and aligning them into the writers’value positions. Appraisal resources in business letters are explored in this thesis to discover what are the Appraisal distribution features, and how the resources work together to achieve the interaction between the writer and the reader.To explore the Appraisal resources in business English letters, both qualitative and quantitative analysis are adopted to study 60 business letters selected from business communication books. Systemic Coder 4. 68 is used as the instrument to get the occurrence of all Appraisal resources and their distribution features. The statistical results reveal that Appraisal resources are massively adopted to facilitate the establishment of interactive relationship between the writers and the readers of business English letters. Among these three Appraisal resources, Attitude and Engagement resources are much preferred than Graduation resources, which indicates that in the process of persuading and aligning the readers, the writers of business letters adopt plentiful linguistic expressions to show their emotions and attitudes to some people or events, and put forward some alternative voices to adjust the space with the value positions. Based on these results obtained from the data, the author gives a detailed analysis of how each Appraisal resources and its subcategories are used strategically and skillfully to achieve the interaction between the writer and the reader.This thesis contributes to Appraisal theory by applying it to the construction of writer-reader interaction in business English letter which is a new research field. It provides pedagogical implications for business English students to get a better understanding of business letters by recognizing the writers’value positions, and pay special attention to the linguistic expressions associated with Appraisal resources in their writing practice.