An Analysis Of Attitudinal Meanings In Chinese Presentation Speech

Presentation speech, which belongs to public speaking and is the indispensible section in award ceremony, refers to formal words to evaluate achievements of the recipient. Through listening to the presentation speech, audiences can understand the recipient's achievements, recognize his/her excellent dignity, and learn from him/her. As for public speaking, many linguists and language scholars have studied it from various approaches, but nobody has analyzed the attitudinal meanings of presentation speech from appraisal perspective, let alone Chinese presentation. This thesis will explore the attitudinal meanings of Chinese presentation speech to answer what features of attitudinal meanings in it are and why they have such features. With the answers, we can expand the fields of discourse kinds investigated through appraisal theory and offer attitudinal regularity to understand and construct Chinese presentation speech.Appraisal theory, which develops from the interpersonal meaning of systemic functional grammar, belongs to discourse semantics. The appraisal theory can be analyzed from three sub-systems—Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Attitude refers to the judgement and appreciation which people express towards human behavior, text/process and phenomena after being affected. Engagement is concerned with the stance that speakers/writers adopt, mainly towards the value positions which appear in discourse and which those putative listeners/readers hold. Graduation is mainly concerned with semantic up-scaling and down-scaling, with domain of attitude and engagement, and two axes—force and focus. Therefore, we can find features of attitudinal meanings in discourses through three aspects of attitude—affect, judgement and appreciation.Language data in this paper are 20 texts of presentation speeches delivered in two"Touching China"award ceremonies, the Chinese yearly spiritual epic, and they are composed by the committee of this program, so these texts can represent relevant language features of Chinese presentation speech. With qualitative and quantative methods combined together, this paper analyzes the attitudinal meanings through language analysis, qualitative analysis, statistic analysis, inspection and study, and finds the conclusion.Based on the analysis, this paper finds features of attitudinal meanings in presentation speeches in"Touching China": there are 90 places of judgement to evaluate recipients'behavior, which are all positive and the most in number; there are 69 places of appreciation to assess mainly circumstances or things derived from recipients, among which there are 52 phrases or characters to positively evaluate recipients'contributions or fruits, and there are 17 places to negatively assess the stern and hard circumstances under which recipients live or work, the appreciation stands second; there are 21 places of affect, among which there are 13 phrases or characters to express positive feelings towards recipients, circumstances or fruits, and 8 places of affect to negatively evaluate these objects.General reasons for these features are discourse goals, i.e. to reward recipients with words so as to resonate among audiences. We may discuss general reasons from three aspects: firstly, judgement as the evaluation towards human's behavior corresponds to admiration of recipients'excellent personality, so this attitude can resonate among audiences and stand first in attitudinal resources; appreciation to assess entities can depict the value of fruits and hard circumstances, so audiences can recognize recipients literally and this attitude stands second in attitudinal resources; thirdly, affect used to directly express the feelings of agreement or disagreement can't easily resonate among audiences, so it stands last in attitudinal resources.