On The Appraisal Resources In Uncle Gen’s Commencement Addresses

The success of Uncle Gen’s commencement address has aroused great repercussion in society as well as drawn the public attentions on Chinese commencement addresses. As the last lesson for students in University, commencement addresses obtain inestimable value in education. After being developed and perfected in many years, the Appraisal Theory has been adopted in analysis on corpus from various fields. However, the study on the feasibility of the theory in Chinese corpus is still in the exploratory stage.Based on the Appraisal Theory, this research adopts qualitative methods to study distribution and functions of appraisal resources in commencement addresses containing 14460 Chinese characters from Uncle Gen, to explore applicability of the Appraisal Theory in Chinese discourses and the particularities of Chinese appraisal resources, to figure out the deep reasons why the speaker did commencement addresses successfully. This research aims to provide a new perspective for people to analyze and write commencement addresses, as well as promote the development of the Appraisal Theory.According to this research, there are plenty of appraisal resources in those commencement addresses. Those various appraisal resources with different realizations possess functions in forming the image of the speaker, controlling dialogic space and establishing alignment with audience. Appraisal resources in those addresses possess three characteristics. Firstly, one attitude resource can contain more than one emotion and feeling. Secondly, engagement and focus can be realized without marked words. Thirdly, two up-scaling intensification resources modifying the same action and thing can flag both positive attitude and negative attitude. There is an efficient persuasive mechanism in those commencement addresses, through which the speaker communicates with audience in feelings and cognition as well as controls dialogic space and topics so as to achieve success in commencement addresses. The realization of this mechanism depends on functions and interactions of appraisal resources adopted in those commencement address.On the basis of those discoveries, this research provides four suggestions for writing commencement addresses. Firstly, adopting enough appraisal resources to form the effective persuasive mechanism, for instance, employing more attitude resources and engagement resources; Secondly, regarding students as the protagonists of addresses and guiding them to participate in addresses, for instance, employing more attitude resources to describe feelings and emotions from students; Thirdly, controlling dialogic space to ensure alignment with audience and authority of education. Fourthly, picking topics of commencement addresses both related to students’ life and concerned with development of the world and human being.The above-mentioned analysis shows that the appraisal resources are used frequently in Uncle Gen’s commencement addresses. Adoption and functions of appraisal resources in Uncle Gen’s commencement addresses obtain characteristics of themselves. The persuasive mechanism realized by adopting appraisal resources is the source of the success of those commencement addresses. The Appraisal Theory is available in analyzing Chinese commencement addresses, while Chinese appraisal resources involved in this research possess characteristics distinct from English appraisal resources due to the specialty of Chinese.