Discourse Analysis On President Obama’s State Of The Union Address From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

State of the Union Address(SUA)is delivered annually by the President of the United States to a joint session of the United States Congress.In view of its significance to interpret the United States’ domestic and foreign policies,SUA is bound to attract the attention of the whole world.Based on Martin’s Appraisal Theory,taking the State of the Union Address as the research data,this study intends to explore and analyze the distribution of appraisal resources and the reasons behind the distribution.It aims to explore how to convey their attitudes towards people,entity or behavior to the audience and how to realize the interpersonal meaning.Appraisal Theory(AT),which is proposed by James R.Martin and his colleagues,is to study interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics.Appraisal Theory can be divided into three sub-systems—Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.Since it is first carried out,AT has been widely adopted to analyze many different genres,such as news,advertisements,political speech,etc.Actually a lot of efforts have been made to study SUA.It should be noticed that most of those researches focus on Attitude system of AT and they turn out to be political commentaries and just a few of them are from the perspectives of linguistics.AT is scarcely applied to study the SUA.Within the framework of AT,qualitative and quantitative methods are employed in the thesis.The findings of the research can be concluded as follows: First,a large number of Appraisal resources are used in SUA,in which Attitude resources occupy the highest frequency of occurrence in the three sub-systems of Appraisal system.Within the Attitude system,the Appreciation resources are preferably used.Second,in the system of Engagement,it shows no striking preference for Expansion or Contraction,both of which play a vital role in constructing the interpersonal meaning.Under Graduation system,Force resources are overwhelmingly preferred to Focus resources.It indicates that the president is eager to strengthen his views and beliefs soas to win audiences’ confidence and trust.All in all,this thesis is an attempt to apply the Appraisal Theory to political discourse analysis and it provide some valuable information and suggestions for related research.