Attitudinal Meaning in Letters of Recommendation Written by Some Lecturers of the University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana

Abstract

The main communicative purpose of Letters of Recommendation (LORs) is to share the writer’s evaluation of the candidate. Every kind of evaluation draws distinctively on resources of grammar. To this end, Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal System was adopted to examine the mechanisms through which some lecturers of a Ghanaian university express their evaluation in 35 purposively sampled letters. The study concludes that evaluation plays a crucial role in the construal of ideology, voice and stance in the LORs genre, and that the dominance of judgement is a proof of the communicative purpose of the LOR genre.