Interpretative Power Analysis Of Appraisal Resources Over The Interpersonal Meaning In President Bush's Addresses

Political speech is noted for its strong persuasive force. A huge amount of related studies have been conducted from its various aspects, including: its rhetorical characteristics, language and stylistic features and so on. And among the previous studies, the interpersonal sphere of political speech has been touched upon from time to time. However, previous studies on the interpersonal meaning of public speeches have ignored the interpersonal function of appraisal (evaluative) resources and its role of dynamic interaction between the addresser and audience. This paper aims to explore the role of appraisal resources in building interpersonal meaning in political speeches based on the framework of Appraisal Theory first initiated by Professor Martin. And through the present research we hope to see how these appraisal resources in political speeches are applied to maintain solidarity, to get alignment with the audience, to conduct a tactical argumentation, to show respect and finally to persuade the audience to accept the various political purposes in the speech.Appraisal theory adopted in this research is the system of semantic resources used to explore, describe and explain the way in which language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construe textual personas and to manage interpersonal relationship. The framework of Appraisal theory contains three subsystems: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement. The theory falls into the general framework of Systemic Functional Grammar and is a complement to Halliday's grammar-based model by focusing on the semantics of evaluation for exploring interpersonal meaning. The present research makes a hypothesis that the interpersonal meta-function of appraisal resources is to enhance political persuasion and appraisal resources are frequently drawn upon in political speeches. Thirty American President Bush's Weekly Radio Address (PBWRA) samples are randomly chosen as the corpus. The distribution of all the appraisal resources is scrutinized and measured with the help of the statistical software (Sys-coder). Explanations are accordingly attached. From both the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the appraisal resources in the thirty PBWRA samples, we come to the conclusion that:Appraisal resources are massively used in PBWRA. As far as the interpersonal function of the appraisal resources is concerned, it is revealed that Attitude system is the basic system drawn to construct the attitudinal positioning and manipulation with the putative audience. To be more concrete, Judgment, Affect and Appreciation resources are used to achieve shared normative positioning, emotional positioning and social value positioning. In Graduation, attitudinal meanings are graded and more of Graduation values are used to tune up the forces of attitudinal meaning, which is decided by the strong persuasive stance of the political addresser, and it is also revealed that implicit attitudinal meanings are evoked by graduation resources. These implicit attitudinal meanings are just a kind of argumentation from the implicit level. In Engagement, dialogically expansive values are used more frequently in the address to show that the speaker prefers to employ more dialogically expansive resources to negotiate with the audience or other voices, to win out in the dialogue, and to persuade the audience. In the mean time, the use of dialogically contractive resources is also important in that through their internal integrity and accurateness, the president successfully fends off the divergences and persuades the audience. And finally, all the appraisal resources are interwoven to achieve the final communication purpose: persuasion.This study is an application of Appraisal theory to the study of interpersonal meaning in political speeches. Such a research is meaningful in that: It proves the significance of the interpersonal meaning of appraisal resources in political speeches. It also provides a new approach to appreciate political speeches other than rhetoric—the traditional approach. Such an approach can be introduced into the domain of text analysis within SFG.