Attitudinal Analysis Of The Addresses Delivered By George W. Bush On The Incident Of 9/11 Attacks

With Appraisal Theory as the framework, this thesis analyzes the attitudinal meanings in the addresses made by the President of the United States George W. Bush on the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.Appraisal Theory was first proposed by J. R. Martin and his colleagues in 1990s. It extends Halliday's models to study the language of evaluation. It is a development of the Systemic Functional Linguistics. Appraisal Theory gives preference to evaluation achieved through lexis rather than clause rank grammar, and it also distinguishes explicit attitudes from implicit attitudes.Appraisal Theory is composed of three sub-systems, which are Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Attitude can be further divided into three categories, which are Affect, Judgement and Appreciation. This thesis studies the attitudinal meanings in the addresses made by Bush on 9/11 attack, aiming to find the general features of the attitudinal meanings in these addresses, and how the speaker employs the attitudinal resources to interact with the audience.This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the main contents and the significance of this thesis. Chapter 2 reviews the previous study on attitudinal resources and political speeches. Chapter 3 introduces Appraisal Theory, with the special focus on Attitude system. Chapter 4 is the detailed analysis of the 7addresses made by George W. Bush on 9/11 attacks, and the result of the analysis is also discussed in this chapter. Chapter 5 serves as the conclusion of the whole thesis, and the limitations of this thesis is also discussed.Through the study of the data, it is found that positive attitudes are foregrounded in these addresses, and among all the three attitudinal meanings, Judgment accounts for the most in the addresses. Among all the affect, the attitude of desire is foregrounded. In the attitudinal meanings of Appreciation, positive valuation is foregrounded. Most positive attitudes are made towards"we","our nation"and"the government of the United States", while most negative attitudes are made towards the terrorists. From this analysis it can be concluded that the speaker mainly expresses his desire to fight against terrorism. He also positively appraises the capability of the government of the United States and the bravery of the people of the United States. Meanwhile, he condemns the terrorists by appraising them negatively.