Appraisal Analysis Of The Interpersonal Meaning In Obama's Presidential Election Speeches

Political speeches are traditionally approached from the perspective of rhetoric and stylistics, the interpersonal meaning is then rarely focused on. Political speeches delivered on occasions like inaugural ceremony and debate have been studied while the speeches during the election campaign are seldom touched upon. As a unique kind of political communication, the U.S. presidential election speeches are well-designed and rich in emotional expressions to realize interpersonal meanings, helping the candidates to achieve persuasion.The thesis aimed to analyze the interpersonal meaning of appraisal resources in American President Barrack Obama's presidential election speeches, applying the framework of appraisal theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) with a view to revealing what linguistic elements realize negotiation of attitude. All the appraisal resources were identified and categorized into the three sub-systems of attitude, engagement and graduation in appraisal theory. It was especially concerned with how Mr. Obama positioned his attitudinal meanings to activate interpersonal function in the speeches so as to achieve sodality among the audience of different backgrounds.Based on the analysis of three important speeches during Obama's presidential campaign, this study first identifies the appraisal resources in the materials and then the distribution and frequency of these resources are collected with the help of Wordsmith. Detailed analyses of the identified parts of speeches are elaborated further to offer a full description and interpretation of the speeches. In this process, it is focused on how these appraisal resources are used to express the speaker's attitude towards the concerned entities, construe and adjust the images from what he has said. By doing so it is elaborated further how it takes effects in achieving persuasion in his speeches.The results reveals that attitudinal resources are richly employed in which the security issue is a main concern in his speeches; force values are overtly used to magnify the addresser's voices and different from some similar research done before, it is found the dialogic expansive appraisal resources are outnumbered by the contractive ones in which disclaim prevails and takes up 67% of the engagement resources. This indicates that contractive appraisals function not only to contract dialogic space to ensure internal integrity but direct to fend off differences and achieve alignment with audiences in his speeches. The speech features are counted for the persuasive nature of political speeches and .As an application of the appraisal theory to investigate the interpersonal meaning in campaign speeches, this study proves the significance of appraisal resources in activating interpersonal meaning and it offers a possible new approach to discourse analysis.