Notes
Advertisements are part and parcel of society. As media texts addressing the masses, they have an immense impact on society. By entering the private world of a potential consumer, they do not only inform them about what is new on the market, but also reflect and prescribe values and norms through the language they use. The aim of this doctoral dissertation is to explore and describe the occurrence and use of appraisals in British advertisements, addressing primarily women, and their social effect, by applying the appraisal model developed by Martin and White (2005) as an analytical tool. Appraisal is one of three discourse semantic resources construing interpersonal meanings. It is divided into three categories/systems - attitude, graduation and engagement. Attitude encompasses the resources for expressing feelings (affect), for assessing behaviour (judgement) and resources for assessing things (appreciation). Attitudes can be explicit and implicit, have a positive or negative status, and can be graded. Engagement is concerned with sources in propositions, which authors/writers (textual voices) use to express their position towards the opinions of others by acknowledging and rejecting them, i. e. alignment and disalignment with alternative opinions (voices). The central aim of the study is to identify and analyse all explicit and implicit attitudes, their targets and status, types of graduation and engagement, lexico-grammatical realisation of explicit attitudes, and sources of propositions in each advertisement. The analytical section of the dissertation comprises quantitative and qualitative research methods. The average ratio for each appraisal category and its subcategories, attitudinal targets and status, as well as for the lexico-grammatical realisation of explicit attitudes for 200 advertisements is calculated on the basis of data first gathered for each advertisement separately. This is followed by an interpretation of the results, and a description and explanation of the characteristics and particularities of appraisal choices. This provides an insight into the frequency of appraisal occurrence, the use and manifestation of appraisals, preferences for appraisal use as well as an insight into the value system of advertisements. The research is carried out within the theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics, which describes language as a social practice, whereby linguistic choices depend on the social functions that humans/texts wish to accomplish. In this way, context plays an important role in the analysis of language, and thus of appraisals. By taking the co-text, context and creative language (e. g. ellipsis, short sentences, word puns, metaphors) of advertisements into consideration, the dissertation also demonstrates some important methods of identifying attitudes and targets, and consequently values, by focusing on other linguistic sources and other sources as well as on the mutual interactivity of appraisal categories and their connection with other elements. The dissertation also highlights some important pragmatic uses of graduation and engagement.