An Analysis Of Attitudinal Meanings In Opening Remarks Of President Obama's Political Speeches

In this thesis, a tentative study of the attitudinal resources in the opening remarks of political speeches delivered by American President Barack Obama is made in the framework of appraisal theory.In the early 1990s, Australian linguist J.R. Martin first introduced The Appraisal Theory, which is a newly extension on theory of interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Grammar, and is also a slightly newly developed theoretical framework. The theory focuses on evaluative resources in texts. It develops the Systemic Functional Linguistics. Three basic systems -- Attitude, Graduation and Engagement constitutes the Appraisal Theory. It gives priority to evaluation rather than achieved by lexical grammar. According to Martin, the Appraisal Theory is composed of the system of Attitude, Graduation and Engagement. And attitude system is the vital one in this theory, which are categorized into three sub-systems -- Affect, Judgment and Appreciation.This research conducts a descriptive methodology combined with interpretation to analyze the data -- 30 opening remarks in the political speeches delivered by President Obama.Within the theoretical framework of Appraisal Theory, a descriptive analysis is worked, aiming to analyze the corpus, summarizing the common features of the ways of expressing attitude meanings and explaining the reasons at the sametime. The 30 opening remarks of President Obama's speeches during January, 2009 to September, 2010 are chosen as the corpus for the present research because the political speeches chosen here are discourses of the time that have distinctive historical features and must be a rich resources of attitudinal resources.