Attitudinal Meanings In The Discourse Of The U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses During The Cold War

In this thesis, a tentative analysis of the attitudinal resources in inaugural address 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 systematic 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 clause rank grammar and distinguishes explicit attitudes from implicit attitudes (attitudinal tokens whose values are triggered by ideational meanings).Within the theoretical model of Appraisal Theory, a descriptive analysis is made about the attitudinal meanings of the 11 U.S. presidential inaugural addresses during the Cold War, aiming to investigate the attitudinal resources to find out the attitudinal positioning of speakers in the speeches and how it is realized through the use of language. The 11 U.S. presidential inaugural addresses during the Cold War are chosen as the corpus for the present study because the addresses chosen here are discourses of the time that have distinctive historical features and must be a rich repertoire of attitudinal resources.Through the analysis, a number of major findings are achieved. First, the presidential inaugural addresses during the Cold War are rich in attitudinal resources, and positive evaluations are foregrounded. Second, among all the attitudinal meanings, Judgement accounts for the most in all the 11 speeches, the majority of which are positive and are applied to evaluate 'we/us (referring to the nation, the people and the government of the U.S.)', and the speakers tend to make judgments implicitly. Third, among all the affects, the attitude of desire is foregrounded to indicate the desire of the speakers and the people of the U.S. Forth, within all kinds of appreciations, attitudinal meanings of positive valuations are typically foregrounded, and most of them are also concerned with 'we/us (referring to the nation, the people and the government of the U.S.)'. Fifth, as a typical feature of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and...