| In recent years, with the development of the internet and e-commerce, online shopping is becoming more and more popular in people’s daily life. Different from shopping in the real life, after receiving and using the products, the customers are invited to write pieces of customer reviews to evaluate them as far as the products’ qualities and services of the online shopping websites are considered. Therefore, Online Customer Reviews(OCRs) come into being accordingly as network discourses, and it gradually becomes a hot topic. By evaluating the goods and services to give feedback information, the customers that write customer reviews can be seen as reviewers. They express their feelings towards the goods they have bought, including their satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Meanwhile, they try to influence the potential customers’ decisions, persuading them to buy the same goods or give up the intention of buying the same goods. So, OCRs can express the interpersonal meaning, and the study about OCRs from the perspective of Appraisal theory(AT) is of significance.This thesis tries to make a discoursal study on OCRs from the perspective of AT which is the new development of Systemic Functional Grammar(SFG) concerning interpersonal meaning. AT, also called Appraisal system, operates on the lexicon-grammar layer and can be divided into three sub-systems: Attitude system, Engagement system and Graduation system.Since the appearance of AT, it has been applied to varieties of discourse analysis.The significance of this thesis contains two aspects. Theoretically, it expands the research field of network discourse and enlarges the applied area of AT on discourse analysis.Practically, this study sets practical directions for both the online shopping websites and the online shopping customers. 1500 pieces of OCRs are chosen from three famous online shopping websites: Amazon.com, Walmart.com, and eBay.com to build a small corpus with238,353 words, and all the data are in English. Based on the research purpose and significance,three research questions are put forward: 1) What are the frequencies and distributions of different Appraisal resources in the OCRs? What are the differences among different Appraisal resources’ frequencies and distributions? 2) How do the online customers express the interpersonal meaning by using Appraisal resources? 3) What are the features of OCRs from the perspective of AT?Qualitative research method with statistical description is adopted in this study for the objectivity. The major findings are as follows:Firstly, there are various Appraisal resources in the OCRs and the frequencies and distributions of them are different. In detail, the frequency and distribution of Attitude resources(970; 48%) are the highest, followed by those of Engagement resources(594; 29%)and Graduation resources(478; 23%). And the gap between Engagement and Graduation is not large. In addition, there are differences among the sub-categories of each sub-system.Secondly, OCRs can be used to express the interpersonal meaning. By means of the OCRs, the reviewers construct their identities as the customers, showing satisfaction or dissatisfaction towards the goods they have bought. Meanwhile, they try to build an interactive relationship with the potential customers and make them stand in the same line,thus persuading them to buy the goods or give up the intention of buying the goods.Thirdly, in terms of AT, OCRs show four features. To begin with, although OCRs are in written forms, they possess the features of oral English, including easy words, phrases and short sentence structures. Secondly, OCRs are subjective and persuasive, which can be used by the reviewers to express stances and influence the potential customers’ decisions. Thirdly,there are many kinds of clerical errors in the OCRs, including the grammar error, spelling error and punctuation error, which dues to the features of network discourse. Finally, in the OCRs, the reviewers will add some other ways to give evaluations, including the special use of punctuations, the use of emoticons and the capitalization of specific words or phrases. |
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