Attitudinal Resources In English Public Speeches On Politics, Education And Economy From The Perspective Of Positive Discourse Analysis

As a special genre, public speech is to achieve its special social function, that is, in public places, to inspire people's emotions, cause the audience to echo with the speaker's stance on political or social issues. Many scholars both at home and abroad have conducted multidimensional study of public speeches, whereas the positive discourse analysis of attitudinal recourses in public speeches on different topics is a fresh try.In this thesis, a tentative analysis of the attitudinal resources in English public speeches is made in the framework of Appraisal Theory. Appraisal Theory, first proposed by J. R. Martin and his colleagues in 1990s, extends Halliday's model of the realization of interpersonal meaning and offers Systemic models to study the language of evaluation. It is a development of the Systemic Functional Linguistics, which takes"system"as the core and"appraisal"as the focus. Appraisal Theory consists of three basic systems: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement. It gives preference to evaluation achieved through lexis rather than grammatical perspective.Within the theoretical model of Appraisal Theory, a descriptive analysis is made about the attitudinal meanings of the total 60 English public speeches on politics, education and economy, with 20 representative speeches on each topic, delivered in the year 2008 and 2009 by U.S. Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and several other educational and economic scholars, aiming to investigate the attitudinal positioning of speakers and how it is realized through the attitudinal resources employed in the speeches.As a complement to CDA, positive discourse analysis analyzes the discourse from a positive point of view, making discourse analysis theory more complete and enabling all corpora more comprehensive. This thesis explores the speakers'preferences in their use of attitudinal resources and the proportions of attitudinal resources used in the respectively different speeches. The author uses the software– Corpus Tool to measure the distribution of the attitudinal resources in public speeches and gives explanation accordingly. The result of the thesis is helpful for us to have a better understanding of the distribution of the attitudinal resources in public speeches on different topics. The 60 speeches in the year 2008 and 2009 are chosen as the corpora for the present study because the speeches chosen in this historical period are discourses of unique and distinctive characters, with the new American president coming into office and with the world financial and economic crisis, originating in the United States in September 2008, which imposes the huge impact on the world political situation, economic development and educational prospects.It is found that in these 60 public speeches, positive vocabulary is much more than negative words. As to attitudinal resources, judgmental words are employed the least, whereas appreciation is the most used in political and ecnomic public speeches; appreciation is employed the most, whereas affect is the least used in educational public speeches.The thesis is divided into six chapters. Chapter one introduces the aims, objectives as well as the organization of the thesis. Chapter two presents a literature review of the previous research on Appraisal Theory, public speeches, and the development of discourse analysis. Chapter three is the theoretical framework with Appraisal Theory and attitude being discussed in detail. Chapter four is the methodology of the present study. Chapter five presents the distribution feature of attitudinal resources in public speeches. Chapter six concludes the whole thesis, and discusses the limitations of the present thesis, and makes some suggestions for further studies.