An Analysis Of The British Chancellor Of The Exchequer's Financial Speeches-From The Perspective Of Engagement Resources In The Appraisal Theory

Engagement,as one of the three sub-systems of the Appraisal Theory,is used to adjust and negotiate the arguability of the speaker's or the writer's utterances.The Engagement resources are frequently found in various kinds of discourses,such as social discourses and academic discourses.These resources reflect the speaker's or the writer's stance and attitude towards an event or issue.The use of such resources can be considered as an interpersonal strategy to realize the alignment or disalignment with the ideal audiences or readers by the speaker or the writer.The present thesis aims to investigate the Engagement resources distributed in financial speeches delivered by Alistair Darling,the incumbent Chancellor of the Exchequer of the UK.It explores the features of the Engagement resources distributed in the corpus data,in order to find out how the speaker negotiates with the anticipated audiences,by means of using Engagement resources,and to examine how the evaluation and persuasiveness of the speeches are realized through such resources.In this study,both the quantitative method and the qualitative method are employed.The quantitative method is applied to analyze the frequencies of the Engagement resources distributed in the data.The updated linguistic software UAM CorpusTool assists the analysis in this study.Regarding the qualitative method,the thesis focuses on how the speaker tactically deals with the alternative dialogic voices and how the speaker employs the Engagement resources to establish solidarity with his audiences.Through the empirical study,the present thesis concludes that the use of Engagement resources is a speaking strategy to express the stance and viewpoint of the speaker and to negotiate different voices explicitly or implicitly in the context,so that the speaker tactically builds alignment with his putative audiences,and persuades the audiences to side with him.The thesis provides a tentative study for both the Engagement subsystem based on the Appraisal Theory and the genre of finance al speech.Moreover,this study plays an important role in the development of interpersonal meaning in the Systemic-Functional Linguistics.It is also hoped that the present thesis can potentially provide a means for the further study on the Appraisal System and on the public speaking.