In the context of globalisation, tourism websites have emerged as crucial platforms for governments to promote destinations and attract potential visitors, with their textual content exerting profound implications for destination image-building and international appeal. Based on the Appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics, this study employed the UAM Corpus Tool 3.3 and a mixed-methods approach to analyse the official Shaanxi English-language tourism website, focusing on the distribution patterns and persuasive mechanisms of evaluative resources. The findings indicate that the Attitude system is predominantly realised through Appreciation resources, foregrounding cultural value and aesthetic appeal in destination representation. Engagement and Graduation further reinforce persuasive effectiveness by regulating intersubjective positioning and evaluative intensity. Specifically, the discourse is characterised by a high proportion of monoglossic statements that project authority, alongside heteroglossic strategies, particularly entertain and attribute, that facilitate reader alignment and dialogic involvement. Within the Graduation system, Force resources are most salient, intensifying evaluation and scaling cultural significance. Collectively, these evaluative patterns construct an authoritative yet engaging tourism narrative through affective appeal, stance negotiation, and evaluation scaling, thereby strengthening both persuasive impact and destination image construction. This study demonstrates the analytical value of the Appraisal framework for understanding evaluative meaning-making in online tourism discourse.

Keywords: Appraisal Theory; Tourism websites; Attitude; Persuasion; UAM Corpus Tool 3.3

DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2026-3201-13

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