Semogenesis Of Evaluation In American Presidents' State Of The Union Addresses

Drawing on the concept of semogenesis proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen,the Appraisal System developed by Martin,and the complementary hierarchies of realization,instantiation,and individuation in Systemic Functional Linguistics,the present study conducts a tentative study into the semogenetic patterns in American State of the Union Addresses between 1965 and 2012.The three-pronged approach of largescale corpus investigation,meso-scale semi-automated corpus annotation,and manual discourse analysis has been adopted as the primary research methodology.The major findings may be summarized as follows.1)The study confirms the feasibility of three-pronged approach.The study confirms the feasibility of the three-pronged approach.As both large scale corpus investigation and manual discourse analysis are featured with their respective shortcomings,the present study adopts a “best of both worlds” approach,which exhibits its advantages in the following aspects.First,large scale corpus investigation facilitates the scholars to pin down the register-specific linguistic features of State of the Union Addresses as a special genre,and adapt the Appraisal System to these skewed linguistic features.Second,by adopting manual discourse analysis,the strength of instinct and interpretation may be reserved,which brings about a richness and flexibility of analysis.2)The study sets up a unified model of instantial appraisal.Previously,systemic functional linguists and corpus linguists have been working independently of each other,studying the intratextual evaluative prosody and intertextually accumulated semantic prosody respectively.Drawing on the concept of semogenesis,which breaks the text boundary,the present study attempts to set up a unified model of instantial appraisal,which views both intra-and inter-textual expansion of evaluative meaning as a cyclic semiotic trajectory.3)Viewing language as a complex dynamic open system,the study pins down the theoretical motivation for separating individuation from instantiation.Since the turn of the century,Martin and his students have proposed the elevated the role of language users,and set individuation as the third hierarchy complementary to realization and instantiation.However,up to now there are no key evidence for such elevation.Based on the views of language as a complex dynamic open system,the present study pins down language users as the social agents,who are the essential and inseparable part in constant interaction with language in the semiotic trajectory.Individuals bond into dyads,small social groups,and larger social networks via logogenetic trajectories.4)The study provides the linguistic evidence for the transition of SUAs from being “informative” to “persuasive”.Formerly an annual message delivered to the Congress only,State of the Union Addresses used to be “informative” only.However,since President Johnson broadcasted his state of the union address live on TV in 1965,this special political genre has taken on a hue of “persuasion”.The present study unravels this transition with linguistic evidence,notably,the changes in the number and types of syndromes of evaluation throughout these years.The study is of significance in the following three aspects.First,by comparing SUAC and COCA,the present study helps delineate the dynamic nature of evaluation within different frames of reference.Second,the present study implements a rigorous and systematic annotation scheme of appraisal and inter-coder reliability test,which may help reduce the subjectivity in appraisal annotation.Third,the three-pronged approach of large scale corpus investigation,small scale corpus annotation,and manual discourse analysis has been proved feasible in the analysis of evaluative meaning within a particular genre.