The Evaluative Functions Of Transitivity System In Persuasive Discourse

Transitivity is an important semantic system representing the experience of inner heart and the outside world with six kinds of processes. As the development of Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study on Transitivity system has extended to interpersonal meaning as well as textual meaning. In the past few years, many linguists have tried to explore the appraisal values of the Transitivity system. However, most of the studies focus solely on certain aspect of the system. The present study intends to make a compensation for the previous research by studying the whole system from an interpersonal perspective. The proposed model for the present study is chiefly based on the Transitivity system brought up by Halliday and the Appraisal theory brought up by Martin.Since the Appraisal theory was introduced into China, there have been a lot of publications about the realization and function of evaluation. However, they focus their attention mainly on explicit evaluation with implicit evaluation largely ignored. The present study is conducted against this backdrop and gives enough consideration on both implicit evaluative function and explicit evaluative function of the Transitivity system in persuasive discourse.As far as persuasive discourse being concerned, the arrangement of the ideational meaning by the writer is not by random choice. That is to say, the employment of all the ideational meanings and grammatical structures concerns with different intentions of writing. The present research mainly explores the various evaluative functions of each element in Transitivity system through analyzing the inscribed attitude as well as the implicit engagement of the writer.