interpersonal metafunction; web genres; institutional discourse; dialogicity; heteroglossia; modality

The paper aims to provide an insight into the ways the prospective students website texts strive to target and attract the desired audience, and into the interplay of elements contributing to the interpersonal positioning in this advertising-like institutional discourse. The analysis is inspired by Iedema's exploration of the "shouldness" and enablement aspects of institutional discourse and applies Martin and White's classification of engagement features within the appraisal system. The study focuses on the use of modal verbs realizing the anticipatory aspect of the text in constructing the envisaged reader, and their correlation with the representation of the participants in the text and with particular stages or moves in the website generic structure. The research results also seem to support an argument that the heteroglossic or dialogic elements are recursive and may be identified beyond the level of proposition, on the level of genre staging and genre colony.