Attitudinal Meanings In Political Public Speeches

In this thesis, a tentative study of the attitudinal resources in American presidential speeches to American university students 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 systematic-functional linguistics, which takes "system" as the "core" and "appraisal" as the "system". Language is considered as a "means" of analysis in the system. The aim is to find out the stance, ideas and attitude of the appraiser.This thesis conducts a descriptive methodology combined with interpretation to analyze the data. The steps are as follows. First, those words and grammatical structures expressing attitude are identified in the light of the sub-system attitude of the appraisal theory. Then a statistical research is done to the percentage of each kind of value, and a descriptive comparison of those values is made. In the meantime, an interpretative explanation of the preference of the data is given. Through the analysis, it is hoped that those prominent features could be summarized.In this thesis, by applying the above stated methodology, several features are found out in the process of analyzing the ways of expressing attitude. Firstly, the sample analysis reveals that the values of affect, judgment, appreciation are all used in the U.S. presidential speeches to American university speeches, but their frequency is different. Secondly, the preliminary and overall statistics show that the value of judgment is the most frequently used in the U.S. presidential speeches to express their attitudes, which accounts for 50% in the total values of attitude. The second is the grammatical resources of appreciation, which accounts for 30% and the least is the values of affect, which accounts for only 20% in the total values of attitude. Thirdly, in the analysis of the value of judgment, it is found that there are more values of social esteem than social sanction. And in all kinds of values of judgment, capacity ranks first. Furthermore, the values of judgment are expressed more explicitly. On the whole, these features may also be related to the aim and the target audience of the speeches.The findings of this paper are helpful to the teaching of critical reading. Such a research will help students comprehend the presidential speeches more deeply and help them grasp the attitudinal meanings in the presidential speeches more easily. What's more, the present thesis demonstrates that appraisal theory, as a new linguistic theory, can be effectively applied to the analysis of discourse. It proves suitable to be used to analyze the U.S .presidential speeches to American university students. Thus in turn, it provides a new perspective to study presidential speeches.The whole thesis consists of five parts. Part one is a brief introduction. It states the reasons of the selected topic and the methodology of the present thesis. Part two is literature review which summarizes the previous research of political public speech and the appraisal theory. It also explains the theoretical framework of the thesis. Part three applies the sub-system of attitude to analyze the data, describing the features of the ways of expressing attitudinal meanings and explaining the reasons in the meantime. Part four summarizes and discusses the major findings of the research. Part five makes a conclusion for the whole thesis. It also states the limitations and the suggestions for the future research.