Appraisal-theoretic Interpretation Of Gender Differences In Public Speech

The study on language and gender has long been one of the major issues in sociolinguistics. As a social variant of language, gender diversity in language could be regarded as the oldest difference in human language. Ever since 1960s, Women's Rights Movement in the Western world has greatly promoted the study in this field. Forty years after then has boasted greater progress, with the major models in some Western countries including those of deficit, dominance, difference, politeness and constructionism, thus providing a rich view for the research on language and gender. Recently, approach of discourse analysis has gradually become the focus for the study of gender difference in language.Appraisal theory, as a new development of Systemic Functional Linguistics, mainly focuses on the study of evaluative meaning of language. Originating from the interpersonal meaning within the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar, it involves three sub-systems: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, which could also be further divided. It is through the analysis of the above resources in the discourse or text that the position, viewpoint and attitude of speakers/writers are evaluated. The present study is aiming to find the distribution feature of Appraisal values in both female and male addresses, as well as the factors contributing to such distribution.The research questions to be addressed in the present thesis are as follows:1) What Appraisal resources are frequently used in the addresses by both female and male speakers?2) What Appraisal resources are frequently used in the addresses by female and male speakers respectively?3) Is there any similarity and difference between female and male speakers in using Appraisal resources? If there are, how do they manifest in the three sub-systems of Appraisal; and what are the factors contributing to such distribution?To answer the above research questions, the present thesis has selected 8 pieces of public addresses by female and male speakers respectively, accounting for 30,776 words, in which there are 14,778 words in female speeches and 15,998 words in male ones. Processed by CorpusTool, the present research has made a delicate quantitative and qualitative analysis of the target texts. The conclusions are summarized as follows:Firstly, among the general system of Appraisal, Engagement is most-frequently used in the present corpus, within which Contraction is predominant than Expansion. Attitude comes the second, within which Appreciation is preferred by speakers. Graduation is the least-used, with Force having a higher frequency. Secondly, in both female and male addresses, Engagement occupies the most. Concerned with the sub-domains, the first three favorite resources are Appreciation, Contraction and Expansion in female speeches, and Force, Contraction and Expansion in male ones.Thirdly, concerned with similarities, in the general level, both female and male speakers favorite Engagement values; in the bottom level, the values of Deny, Modality, In/Security, Social-esteem and Intensification are preferred by both. With regard to differences, within Attitude, women prefer to use Appreciation resources while men employ more Affect statements; within Engagement, more Counter and Modality resources occur in women's speeches whereas most of Deny and Evidence ones in men's; within Graduation, women favor Focus values while men prefer to use Force ones. Through discussion, it is found that in the situation such as public speaking where the gender character is fuzzy, the language of women and men are tended to be neutral and sometimes exchange.The present thesis has made a thorough analysis of the Appraisal values in public addresses by both female and male speakers so as to probe the gender differences in this field. Limited by the corpus, the present thesis only analyzed 8 speeches by female and male speakers respectively. As a result, further research is still needed to enlarge the corpus and conduct the analysis in a more comprehensive way.Nevertheless, by virtue of the lexical analysis of Appraisal values, the present thesis is looking forward to introducing the Appraisal theory into the teaching of English public speaking, thus contributing to the improvement of oral English competence of Chinese learners.