Abstract

Chinese universities are eagerly questing to earn international reputation by showcasing their achievements in the current importance placed on higher education globally. It is acknowledged that the introduction section published on the universities' websites plays an important role in the publicity of universities. Little attention has been paid to understand how this discourse is linguistically constructed with a communicative purpose to align readers. This article employs an Appraisal analysis (Martin & White, 2005) to investigate how the evaluative language used in the introduction section embodies the values upheld by Chinese universities. The article attempts to detail the evaluative language patterns used to construct the universities' introduction section by examining a corpus of nine elite Chinese universities' (known as the C9 League) websites. The findings reveal that multiple verbal appraisal features are used by these universities to realize the evaluative meanings with a purpose to positively align themselves with the audience. It shows that the universities' introduction section is formulated as factual informative messages to portray trustworthiness and authenticity. The intensified positive evaluation of the introduction section allows universities to effectively portray a positive identity in the global context through this comparatively new professional genre.