An Appraisal Perspective On English Political Speeches

In the first years of the 21st century, especially since 9·11 event, great changes have taken place in international community. In 2003, claiming that the Iraqi regime owns Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and has ties with terrorists, the United States of America started Iraqi War to remove Saddam Hussein from power. However, nothing has been found to support its launching of the war. Although America argues that the war was started to liberate Iraqi people from tyranny, the facts in Iraq now reveal that democracy, liberty and equality are just deceiving slogans, with tension remaining in Iraq, which is influencing negatively the Middle East region and the whole world. Hegemonic politics is obviously operating in this war, to recognize it more clearly, it is necessary to study how political speeches are employed by the American politician to defend for starting the war.This thesis attempts to analyze English political speeches on the basis of the Appraisal Theory. As a new development in the Systemic Functional Linguistics, Appraisal Theory, or system, set up by J.R. Martin, consists of three subsystems:attitude, graduation and engagement. Attitude is concerned with our feelings, including emotional reactions, judgment of behavior and evaluation of things; graduation is concerned with language resources which act to provide grading or scaling of other attitudinal meanings; engagement system is concerned with sourcing attitude.The thesis first reviews previous studies on political speeches, and finds that the studies are mainly done from approaches of traditional rhetoric, discourse analysis and socio-psychology. Based on the theoretical framework of the Appraisal theory, the author expands and develops Martin's Appraisal Theory by combining it with theories of Adaptation and Speech Acts to improve its practicality and operability. And then, the author makes a tentative analysis of the attitudinal meanings in George W. Bush's three speeches on Iraqi war to reveal how Bush, as the speaker, construe certain social relation between the speaker and his hearers, what evaluations he has made of the events and the world around him and how the evaluations are made. In the analysis, the author also finds that evaluation does not only take place at the lexical level, but also at almost any other level of language system, for example, the particular Theme-Rheme structure of a sentence can produce evaluative meanings.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction to the current study; chapter two reviews the previous studies on political speeches at home and abroad; chapter three is about the theoretical foundation of this thesis, Appraisal Theory; chapter four provides a detailed analysis of the three subsystems of appraisal in the sample sentences; chapter five summarizes the major findings and the limitation of the current study.