Analysis Of Engagement Resources In U. S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

U. S. presidential inaugural address is a type of political public speech which is vended home and abroad on the inauguration day. It has a great influence in the American political life. It fully reflects the new president's basic policies and guidelines on politics, economics, diplomacy and military. Its main purpose is to inspire the people, to gain support and to establish the new president's authority. Therefore, this kind of speech becomes the hotspot of linguistics. Linguists get down to analyzing the feature of this discourse from the fields of style, rhetoric, pragmatics genre, etc. It is also the spotlight of many speech lovers who intend to learn its speech techniques.Appraisal Theory or Appraisal System is a development of M. A. K. Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics. It is an interpersonal system under the framework of discourse semantics. Broadly speaking, the theory is concerned with the language of evaluation, attitude and emotion, and with a set of resources which explicitly position a text's proposals and propositions interpersonally. There are three sub-systems in Appraisal. They are attitude, engagement, and graduation which are also called three'evaluative resources'. The engagement resources are chose as the theoretical framework of this thesis.Engagement sub-system covers those meanings which construe for the text a heteroglossic backdrop of prior utterances, alternative opinions and anticipated responses in many ways. It is concerned with how intersubjective relations of alignment and disaligment are built and negotiated and made rhetorically functions. Headings like modality, polarity, evidentiality, hedging/boosting, etc are usually employed in this kind of resources. Dialogic contraction and Dialogic expansion are the two categories.Five inaugural addresses by three U. S. presidents from 1993 to 2009 are selected as the data with 9866 words. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted in order to make the research more reliable and valid. Most of the analyses are done manually, but the software UAM Corpus Tool is also applied to get scientific statistics.Through the quantitative approach, the distributions of the engagement resources in the inaugural addresses are worked out. The dialogic contractive resources account for a higher percentage than the dialogic expansive resources. The data are 51.29% and 48.71% separately. Categories within each dialogic resource have been systematically analyzed. Significance and functionality of these resources in the corpus are found out. The present thesis has done a case study of President Obama's inaugural address which has never been analyzed from this perspective before. This is a tentative study on the analysis of engagement resources in the presidential inaugural addresses. Further study has to be made in this field. It is hoped that more researchers could involve in the Appraisal Theory.