A Study On Persuasiveness In Public Service Advertising Based On Appraisal Theory

Public service advertisements(PSAs)are non-profit advertisements issued by governments,associations,media,businesses and advertising agencies to promote the development of society and changes in people's attitudes and behaviors.As an integral part of the construction of spiritual civilization,public service advertisements have a huge impact on social culture and social management.Appraisal theory is development and supplement of the interpersonal meaning in systemic functional linguistics which focuses on the semantics of evaluation,including people's feelings,judgments and their value judgments on things.Public service advertisements do not aim at making profits.They use rich forms of advertising to arouse people's interest,get their value recognition,and then conduct positive advice and guidance.The persuasive purpose is mainly achieved through audience's resonating with the intrinsic value of advertisements.Appraisal theory and PSA are very consistent in aspect of this interpersonal meaning.However,most scholars at home and abroad mainly conduct researches on public service advertisements from the aspects of sociology,pragmatics and psychology to make study on its linguistic features,crosscultural differences and artistic emotional appeals.There are only a few scholars who study the realization of persuasive effect of public service advertisements from perspective of appraisal theory.Domestic research on PSAs is a general concept and does not specifically refer to certain types of PSAs,so it is meaningful to conduct a study on the realization of persuasion in PSAs of non-governmental organizations based on appraisal theory.This thesis collects 60 public service advertisements from the websites of worldfamous non-governmental organizations and uses these PSAs as a corpus.The author analyzes and unfolds this research under the guidance of Martin's appraisal theory and Aristotle's persuasion mechanism.And with the help of UAM corpus tool,this thesis aims to reveal the characteristics of public service advertisements in the use of appraisal resources and the realization of persuasion.The findings are as follows:(1)Three subsystems of the appraisal theory,namely attitudes(affect,judgment and appreciation resources),engagement(mono-glossic and hetero-glossic resources),and graduation(force and focus)are all applied in PSAs.(2)Due to the different purposes of persuasion,the distribution of appraisal resources in public service advertisements is not balanced.The most widely used is the graduation resource(for it can realize Pathos,Logos and Ethos),accounting for 44.3% of all appraisal resources,followed by 40.3% of attitude resources,and leaving engagement resources account for only 15.4%.(3)The persuasive effect is achieved through different appraisal resources,in which the Pathos and Ethos are mainly achieved by attitude resources;and Logos is mainly realized by engagement and graduation resources.Research on the persuasiveness of non-profit organizations' PSAs not only broadens the application of appraisal theory,but also helps deepen the interpretation of public service advertisements and raise people's enthusiasm for public welfare activities.In addition,this study also has certain enlightening effects on PSA creators.