A Study Of The Realization Of Ideology In Bush's Speeches On The Iraq War: An Appraisal Approach

Political speech is known for its persuasive power. Political speeches are delivered by the addressers to elucidate their positions, viewpoints and policies in view of the political situation home and abroad. The language used in a politician's speech closely depends on the specific time and social context of the political objectives. In his speeches on the Iraq War, Bush presents Iraqi regime as a dangerous"enemy"and repeatedly stresses that the United States, as the defender of peace and justice of the world, has the obligation to save the Iraqi people from the Iraqi tyranny. In this process, the ideology of a discourse has been fully reflected, in turn, language contributes to the formation of ideology, which reflects the dialectical relationship between language and ideology.Appraisal Theory, first proposed by J. R Martin in the 1990s, extends the scope of attitude, develops and perfects the research on interpersonal meaning in Systemic-Functional Linguistics. Appraisal Theory describes and explains the use of language from the lexical aspect. Before the Appraisal Theory came into being, the interpersonal research had been limited to the grammar category, and unable to explain the speaker's attitude clearly. Therefore, Appraisal Theory makes a supplement of the Systemic-Functional Linguistics. In this thesis, the author attempts to choose a comparatively less analyzed discourse—the public political speeches to do the research from the perspective of Appraisal theory. Based on the Appraisal Theory, this thesis investigates the speeches on Iraq War delivered by Bush from the perspectives of attitudinal positioning and dialogical positioning. It aims 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. It tries to find out the way ideology is embedded through evaluation in Bush's speeches, that is, how are different values and ideologies embedded and realized in Bush's remarks on the Iraq war? And, in turn, in what way do these remarks reflect the values and ideologies? It would be very important to find out the way the speaker is engaged in the strategy of the remarks and imparting his ideology and value to influence the audience, thereby realizing the interpersonal meaning in his remarks. A corpus of 45 speeches is established and a quantitative statistic study is conducted by means of the Wordsmith program, and then a qualitative analysis and case study will be conducted. Through analysis, it is found that among the attitudinal meanings, implicit judgement accounts for the most. They are positive judgement to evaluate the entities concerned with We-group and the negative judgement to evaluate the entities concerned with They-group. 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 president of the United States and persuade the audience to support his action and principles.The present study demonstrates that appraisal theory, as a new linguistic theory, can be effectively applied to the analysis of political discourse. It is hoped that this study will provide some useful information for critical reading of the political speeches and some enlightenment on reading and comprehending the political speeches.