A Study On The Interpersonal Meaning Of Electronic Academic Discourse－from The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Computer-mediated communication is playing an increasingly important role inacademic discussions. This new mode of communication not only commands great scholarlyattention, but also attracts active participation of scholars around the globe. Scholars takeactive part in the discussion in various electronic, or e-mail based academic discussion lists.In this study we make a working definition of electronic academic discourse as the textsproduced by the academic discussion taking place in e-mail based discussion lists. This studymainly aims to explore the interpersonal meaning of electronic academic discourse within theframework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), appraisal theory in particular. Appraisaltheory, as a new development of SFL, includes Attitude, Engagement and Graduation.The study shows:1) the online participants prefer to encode Attitude explicitly and alsoencode Attitude as Appreciation, especially in the dimension of Valuation. Another strikingfeature, as the study shows, is that student participants tend to judge themselves with lowercapability, and other members, especially core participants with higher capability.2) theintersubjective dimension of interpersonal meaning is realized by Engagement resources. Theexploration displays that contractive resources for Denial and Countering tend to occur inconjunction with one another. And contractive resources are frequently intertwined withexpansive resources. In doing so, the negative effect caused by Denial or Countering can bemitigated to some extent and therefore makes the viewpoints involved more easily to beaccepted.3) the online participants’ preference to construct a relatively egalitarianrelationship is established in the dynamic online discussion. Analysis shows that this form ofcommunication is benefit of all participants, both students and experts. The students canarouse question and show their own opinions directly and the experts can exchange moreuseful information with other experts or students quickly. In this way, the communication ismore quick, convenient and free. Besides, different from the traditional teaching mode, thismethod of exchange information provides a useful reference for the teaching of English classand also gives a new research perspective about functional grammar and appraisal theory.Limited by the author’s academic level of theory and the range of the research corpus,the paper still has some limitations. But the contributions of teaching mode and newresearching perspective are valuable and significant.