An Analysis Of Bush's Presidential Inaugural Addresses From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Political speeches are delivered by addressers to elucidate their positions, viewpoints and policies considering the political situation home and abroad. It is an important kind of western speaking style and plays a great role in the western political life. Many scholars are interested in the study of it and they carry out extensive researches from the perspectives of rhetoric, sociology, stylistics, psychology and so on. The U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses as an important form of political speeches are drawing more and more attention. Just as Zheng Cheng (2001) claims, each presidential inaugural address has a lasting influence upon America. This tells us the significance and research value of the U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses.Appraisal theory is put forward in the nineties of the twentieth century and is a theory concerning evaluation. It is a recently developed framework for studying interpersonal meaning in the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Li Zhanzi 2002). Appraisal theory is also called appraisal system. This theory/system concentrates on the writer's or speaker's positive or negative attitude to persons, places, entities, events, phenomena and the ways in which the writer or speaker conveys his or her attitudes and positions(Wang Zhenhua 2001). After the theory is put forward, it is widely used to analyze literary, academic, media and other kinds of texts and helps readers to understand the position, viewpoint and attitude of the writer or speaker.In this thesis, we take the appraisal theory as the theory framework and analyze the U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses given by Bush in the year of 2001 and 2005. We aim to explore the distribution of the appraisal resources and the application of different evaluative devices to interpret how the speakers build social relations with listeners to facilitate our understanding of the speakers' intentions.Through the analysis, we have some major findings. We find that there are rich appraisal resources in the two speeches. The positive evaluations are foregrounded. Among the attitudinal meanings, implicit judgement accounts for the most. Most of them are positive and used to evaluate the entities concerned with us. With the engagement resources concerned, the distribution of dialogic contractive resources is higher than the expansive resources. It means that the speaker tends to employ the contractive resources to build his authority as the newly elected president and persuade the audience to support his principles. As for the gradability resources, force resources are mainly used to amplify the utterances of the speaker.All these features can be accounted by making reference to the communicative and persuasive purposes of the inaugural speeches.