A Study On The Appraisal Resources In English Reference Letters

The reference letter is a type of applied writing, widely used in everyday life. Areference is the letter in which one person recommends another to apply for a certainposition or degree. Currently, in Chinese universities, it is a common practice thatteachers are asked to write reference letters for the students who have determined topursue a master’s or doctor’s degree in foreign universities. The role of the referenceletter is to persuade the employer/admission officer to recognize and accept theapplicant in accordance with the writer’s recommendation. In the course of therealization of persuasion purpose, a letter of reference will inevitably contain theauthor’s evaluation and attitude.Appraisal Theory is a new development of Systemic Functional Linguistics byMartin and White. The theory is a functional model of interpersonal meaning at thelevel of discourse semantics, and provides a theoretical framework for analyzingappraisal resources in the text. The thesis aims to explore the distribution of appraisalresources in English reference letters and how they help to achieve the writer’scommunicative purpose with Appraisal as the theoretical basis.30English reference letters are collected as the corpus. On the basis of AppraisalTheory, this research combines quantitative and qualitative research methods toexplore the distribution of appraisal resources and discover the appraisal features inthese materials，so as to reveal the persuasive power of the genre.Based on a detailed analysis and discussion, the findings of this thesis are asfollows:1) There are abundant appraisal resources in these reference letters. Thewriters employ a wide variety of appraisal resources to persuade the readers to acceptthe applicants.2) Among the attitude resources, judgement resources obviouslyoutweigh appreciation and affect ones, which demonstrates that the writers mainlymake use of judgement resources for persuasion.3) The distribution of engagementresources is not balanced, within which disclaim and entertain resources are muchmore than proclaim and attribute ones.4) In terms of graduation, it is found thatreference letters contain quite a lot of force resources for the sake of strengthening thepersuasive power, while focus resources are few and far between through out all thesamples.