A Discourse Analysis Of Cross-border E-commerce Marketing Discourse From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

With the development of e-commerce platform,cross-border e-commerce marketing discourse emerges as a new type of cross-context business discourse.It combines the characteristics of both marketing discourse and online discourse.Based on communicative connotaion,the appraisal theory provides an effective theoretical framework for discourse construction.Relevant research involves the expansion of the theory,its application in different types of discourse and the integration with other theories.In general,the applications of appraisal theory mainly focus on literary discourse such as news and literature,but rarely involve business discourse.Therefore,based on the three systems of appraisal theory,i.e.attitude,engagement and graduation,this paper attempts to uses the software UAM Corpus Tool and BFSU Collocator to study the marketing discourse of apparel commodities on Alibaba.com,a well-known cross-border e-commerce platform.The study explores the distribution of appraisal resources in discourse,and reveals causes in the light of the real context.It is found that the distribution pattern of three systems varies.Attitude resources are the most abundant,focusing on judgment resources for factual description;the obvious usage of assertion resources in the engagement system add communicative effct;the graduation system emphasizes on force resources to enhance the expression strength of discourse.On the one hand,the discourse is specially designed to establish a good seller image,using a large number of positive words to describe product and service and facilitate transactions.On the other hand,it has some shortcomings: the strong seller dominance reduces the strength of customer evaluation and the reliability of marketing;some discourse has a high degree of overlap and lack originality;there are some improper expression,wrong words and too casual sentences.Based on the result,some advice including optimizing,standardizing and improving marketing discourse are proposed.This study is expected to provide useful guidance for cross-border e-commerce sellers to improve the expression of e-commerce marketing discourse and help consumers to understand cross-border e-commerce marketing discourse effectively.