The social aspect of the discourse-semantic appraisal model in British advertisements: The category of attitude

Abstract: The paper examines the language of attitudinal appraisal and its occurrence in the texts of 200 randomly selected contemporary print advertisements from British magazines with a predominantly female readership. For the purposes of this analysis, the discourse-semantic appraisal model by Martin and White (2005) is applied, which categorises attitude as one of three main resources for making interpersonal meanings into affect, judgement and appreciation. The paper presents the results on the frequency of occurrence of directly and indirectly expressed attitude in advertisements and discusses the characteristics of some attitudinal choices, including their manifestation, categorisation, status and social effect. The interest is thus not only in the language that encodes attitudes explicitly but also in the linguistic potential for triggering attitudes. The results show that the multi-establishment of attitudes and the enormous potential of advertising language to evoke them, with the often creative use of language, may be characterised as a typical feature of advertising language. I argue that both explicit and implicit attitudes are one of the key elements in establishing the participants’ values, norms and relationships, hence making the language of attitudes socially significant. Within the discussion of the characteristics of some attitudinal choices, I also attempt to justify the coding of attitudes on the basis of context and co-text. According to systemic functional grammar, context plays an important role in the interpretation of texts, and since appraisals fulfil the interpersonal function of language, the acknowledgment of the context in the interpretation of appraisals is crucial.