A Study On The Attitudinal Meaning In Obama's Shanghai Speech

Political speeches, as an important constituent of public speeches, attract the attention of linguistic researchers due to their distinctive characteristics. They have been widely studied from the perspectives of rhetoric, pragmatics, Systemic-Functional Grammar, cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis, etc.Appraisal Theory, as a new theoretical framework, was put forward by James Martin and other linguists in the 1990s. Appraisal Theory, as the extension and supplement for Halliday's Systemic-Functional Theory, offers people a new approach to study Appraisal linguistic resources from the lexical level rather than the clause level. Appraisal system consists of three sub-systems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation systems. The Attitude system is subdivided into Affect, Judgement and Appreciation which are related to psychological, ethical and aesthetic domains respectively. These three sub-categories interconnect into a complete system of evaluating the Attitudinal linguistic resources in the discourses.Through the analysis of the Attitudinal linguistic resources in president Obama's Shanghai speech with the employment of Attitude system, the present paper aims to find out their distributive characteristics, offer the relevant explanation, and generalize the main Attitudinal meaning expressed in the speech. After the Attitudinal linguistic resources are collected, described and analyzed, the following findings are identified. First, although the three categories of Attitudinal resources (Affect, Judgement and Appreciation linguistic resources) all appear in Obama's Shanghai speech, they account for different proportions, with the ratio of 48.56%,9.62% and 41.82% respectively, which indicates that president Obama mainly uses Affect and Appreciation resources to express Attitudinal meaning. Second, the linguistic resources that express positive Attitudinal meaning occupy 88.46%, so president Obama mainly employs the positive words and expressions to convey the Attitudinal meaning. Then, Attitudinal meaning is mainly realized through three kinds of lexis: adjectives, nouns and verbs. Moreover, the main parts of speech that realize Affect, Judgement and Appreciation meaning are different. Finally, only based on Attitudinal linguistic resources appearing in Obama's Shanghai Speech, the main Attitudinal meaning conveyed by Obama is summarized as follows: American government's friendly and firm attitude to seek the deeper Sino-American cooperation, the American government's desire for expanding American core values and the expectation for the young generation to take the responsibility for the development of Sino-American relationship.