Persuasion Strategies Of Hidden Advertisements From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

In recent years,with the development of social media,more and more companies have released hidden advertisements through official websites to attract and persuade consumers,which shows extraordinary persuasiveness of hidden advertisements(HAs).Wu Ye(2008)considers that it is a kind of advertising that transforms the obvious advertisements into being unnoticeable to reduce evasion and make consumers more easily accept the content conveyed by advertisements.Though a lot of achievements have been made on the persuasion of hard advertisements,there are fewer researches on HAs.Therefore,the thesis aims to study persuasion of HAs to expand the scope of advertising language.Based on the appraisal theory that involves various attitudes negotiated in the text,emotions,and ways of demonstrating author's values and affiliating readers,this thesis uses a total of 300 HAs as a corpus,including respectively 100 Motto hidden advertisements(MHAs)and Event hidden advertisements(EHAs)and Story hidden advertisement(SHAs),to explore the distribution of appraisal resources,the relationships between the distribution of appraisal resources and types of HAs and persuasion strategies reflected by the distribution of appraisal resources in HAs.The main findings are as follows: in all HAs,the number of attitude resources is the largest,followed by engagement and graduation resources.Through Chi-square test,it is found that except the distribution of positive/negative attitude resources and focus resources,the distribution of other appraisal resources is related to the types of HAs.Namely,all kinds of hidden advertisements use positive resources to create positive brand associations.In MHAs,the resources of social esteem and intensification are employed to create motivational languages;The opposition between positive and negative resources creates philosophical beauty;Contract resources are applied to create problem-solution pattern.In EHAs,social sanction resources are used to present a positive brand image;Quantitative resources and some expand resources are employed to achieve logos,while other expand resources magnify dialogue space.In SHAs,un/happy resources and reflection resources evoke consumers' emotions;Monogloss resources are employed to reduce reading difficulty and extend memory.