On The Realization Of Persuasiveness Through Appraisal Resources In English Public Service Advertisements

Public Service Advertisement (PSA) is a kind of advertisement which is non-profit and serves for the public. It carries out the propaganda and education for the public with the small space and abundant themes, aiming to persuade them into changing their attitude and behavior. PSA, therefore, plays an independent part in the social public service cause. Currently, most researchers from home and abroad study the PSA from the perspective of sociology, psychology, rhetoric, pragmatics, etc. Few researchers draw on the Appraisal Theory to study PSA.Appraisal Theory, dealing with the evaluative lexis, is proposed and developed by the Australian linguistic Dr. Martin and his associates in1990s, and is regarded as the new development of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It consists of three systems, namely, attitude, engagement, and graduation, which can be subsystemized. Appraisal Theory concerns the resources expressing the attitudes and the extent of emotions which can be negotiated. Since it comes into being, it has been applied to practical analysis of various kinds of texts, such as news report, autobiography, speech, etc. Persuasion is to change or reinforce the attitude, value, emotion, and behavior. The various ways can reach the persuasion, for example, Aristotle’s appealing modes. The starting point of the thesis, therefore, is that whether or not the persuasiveness of PSA can be realized by the appraisal resources. To ensure the extensiveness and preciseness, the author collects115PSAs from The Times, The New York Times, etc. as the corpus. Adopting the quantitative and qualitative analyses and drawing on the Appraisal Theory, the thesis attempts to reveal how the addressers of PSA realize the persuasiveness through appraisal resources in PSAs. The findings are listed as follows.Firstly, English PSAs employ abundant appraisal resources, with the most frequently employed resources being attitude resources, followed by graduation and engagement resources respectively.Secondly, among the attitude resources, the addressers have the predilection for the appreciation resources taking up50.4%in the total attitude resources, which lies in that appreciation resources tend to be objective, hence persuasive.Thirdly, under the engagement system, the addressers of PSA mainly employ the monogloss to realize the persuasiveness. As a multi-level system, heterogloss plays an important role, with the contractive resources taking up56.8%in the total occurrences of heteroglossic resources and expansive resources43.2%. Under the contractive subtype, the addressers mainly realize persuasiveness via countering resources which can impress the audience. Whereas under the expansive subtype, the entertain resources are favored since they can show the politeness or euphemism.Fourthly, under the graduation system, the persuasiveness of PSAs is mainly dependant on the force subsystem with its resources accounting for98.3%in the total graduation resources, rather than on the focus subsystem. Under the force subsystem, the quantification resources obtain greater favor with the addresser compared with intensification resources.The study on the realization of persuasiveness through appraisal resources not only broadens the application of Appraisal Theory to the discourse analysis, but also helps people better understand the English PSAs and enhance the initiatives of people in participating in the public benefit activities. In addition, the study can shed new light on the translation of English advertisements and English teaching.