Positive Discourse Analysis Of Obama's Weekly Radio Address

This thesis applied the appraisal theory to analyzing the radio address from the positive discourse analysis. The data resources amounts to ten discourses which are at random adapted from American president Obama's weekly radio address. The weekly radio address has become the tradition in America. It came from the president Roosevelt's "Fireside Words" and it belongs to the one form of political speech. Its function is to convey the information and political policy. At the same time, through this way, the president shortens the distance with people, which made his purpose and political intention to be easily accepted. The appraisal theory system is the new development of systematic functional linguistics, which are created by systematic functional linguist Martin and his colleagues on the basis of the research of interpersonal meaning. The appraisal theory is the system of semantic resources. Until now, it develops into the system of evaluating language resources which could describe and illustrate viewpoint, attitude and position of language users. It has three sub-systems which are attitude, engagement and graduation. The positive discourse analysis is the supplement to CDA. It analyzes the discourse from the constructive perspective. PDA does not radically analyze ideology and power relations, but promote the positive reform and put forward the solution in peaceful way. This thesis applies the above way and perspective to analyze the discourses systematically.This thesis amounts to five chapters. The first chapter introduces the purpose, objective, significance and organization of the thesis. The second chapter is literature review which looks back the research of predecessors. In this chapter, the author firstly introduces the previous study of political speech, especially radio address, made by predecessor. The author also mentions the previous researches of PDA, their influence to discourse analysis and the development of appraisal theory at home and abroad. The third chapter introduces the sub-systems-attitude, engagement and graduation respectively so as to construct the systematic structure for PDA. The fourth chapter is the core part in this thesis. Firstly it introduces the data collection and quantitative and qualitative methods. Secondly, it analyzes the implied attitude and position from affect, judgment and appreciation respectively. From the engagement perspective, this part mainly analyzes the resources in the radio address from proclaim, disclaim, entertain and attribute perspectives. Its purpose is that to certify the alternative of dialogic space could build up the alignment. The graduation analysis contains the attitude and engagement resources. This thesis emphasizes 'raiser' in the force, with attempt to stand out the speaker's putative intention. The last chapter is conclusion. It concludes and explains some findings made by three sub-systems under the appraisal theory. And it also points out the suggestions and limitations in the thesis.In a word, this thesis tries to apply the appraisal theory to PDA of Obama's weekly radio address. Although it is not complete and profound, its aim is to open a new perspective for political speech analysis and play an supplementary role in CDA.