A Study Of Environmental Public Service Announcements Based On Appraisal Theory And Qualia Structure Theory

The public service announcement(PSA)refers to the advertisement in the public interest disseminated without charge,to raise awareness and change public attitudes as well as behaviors considering social issues.To play a role in ideological and ethical education for the public,the PSA tends to present stronger prominent vocational effect and interpersonal function compared with other types of announcements.As previous research mainly analyzed the usage of language in PSAs from the perspectives of rhetoric,pragmatics,discourse analysis,Systemic-Functional Grammar and metaphor,most of them have focused on the sentence or discourse level,rarely looking into the characteristics of appraisal words or exploring the effects of appraisal meaning in PSA language.This research intends to analyze appraisal words of environmental public service announcements under the framework of the Appraisal Theory,with the help of a self-built corpus,Antconc analysis software and manual classification.Based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods,the thesis discusses characteristics of appraisal resource distributions in environmental PSAs and analyzes the roles played by each kind of appraisal resource in vocational effects and interpersonal function.Finally,the following conclusions were drawn: 1)Among all words in the environmental PSAs collected,the appraisal words(attitude resources and graduation resources)make up 82% in total,which proves that the PSA language presents obvious evaluative tendency.2)As for the appraisal resources in environmental PSA language,it is the attitude resources,especially the appreciation and judgement resources,that play the dominant roles in evaluative meaning expression.3)The graduation resources primarily depend on raise words of force resources and sharpen words of focus resources to intensify or focus appraisal meanings,which assist attitude resources to express appraisal meanings.4)The environmental PSAs mainly adopt heterogloss as their engagement resources to help enrich the dialogism of texts and to enlarge the space of participation of the readers,which strengthens the vocational effects of language and better achieve its interpersonal function.In addition,the research found that,when appearing in environmental PSAs,some words produce appraisal meanings as there was no evaluation for their own right,and some words change their appraisal types.To explain these language phenomena,the author applied Qualia Structure Theory for analysis and drew the conclusion: 5)during the construing process of the environmental PSA language,language users choose different qualia roles of nouns in different contexts,which results in appraisal meaning production or appraisal meaning changes in those words.The study systematically and deeply dissected appraisal words of environmental PSAs and revealed the appraisal features of this kind of text.It also explained the vocational effect and interpersonal meaning of PSA language from a new perspective.Besides,aiming at the phenomena as appraisal meaning generation or appraisal resource change in some words,the author attempted to explain them from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,providing a new angle for subsequent research on evaluation of language.