A Study On Persuasion In Community Correction-From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

As an emerging restorative justice,community correction plays an increasingly important role in current Chinese judicial system.In the context of community correction,persuasion is the linguistic way to achieve the goal of ideological shift of offenders.To realize this goal,social workers and offenders both apply various appraisal resources to the process of persuasion.This thesis aims at exploring and discussing appraisal resources applied in the stages of preliminary assessment,correction-oriented education and ideological trend report and analyzing how the appraisal resources function in persuasion,thus then expect to make some contribution to the development of Chinese community correction.The study endeavors to explore appraisal resources applied in the discourse of the social workers as well as that of the offenders.The present study aims to address the following research questions:(1)What appraisal resources are employed by both parties in dialogic exchanges to realize persuasion?(2)How do appraisal resources exploited achieve persuasion between social workers and offenders?Drawing on the system of persuasion theory in Social Psychology and the system of attitude in Martin's Appraisal Theory,the present study has formulated an integrated analytical framework applicable for community correction discourse.This paper adopts the study paradigm of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics,from context to discourse,to analyze the appraisal meaning by the specific realization on the strata of lexico-grammar.At the same time,this paper employs the persuasion theory in Communications and Social Psychology to discuss the realization of the persuasion in Community Correction.By analyzing the transcriptions of recordings of 21 discourses,the study investigates the achievement of persuasion in community correction from the stratum of discourse semantics.It is found that social workers and offenders both employ various appraisal resources to clarify their stances and try to align with or disalign from a certain community sharing the same proposition.Social workers apply attitude,engagement and graduation to establish an effective communicator from the perspectives of credibility and attractiveness.Besides,social workers also employ appraisal resources in the message content to try to change offenders' attitudes.In stead of being passive participants,offenders in this particular context adopt appraisal resources to negotiate with social workers by alleviating their guilt with few appraisal resources of negative social sanctions but many negative appraisal resources of social esteem and tenacity,or illustrating their changed attitudes towards their offence with negative appraisal resources of affect.This thesis aims at making some contributions to the employment of language in community correction from the perspective of Appraisal Theory and help with the persuading strategy of the social workers'.