On Attitude Resources In Commencement Speeches:an Appraisal Approach

Commencement speech is a genre of public speaking to graduating students. It is the last lecture for graduating students. Graduation means the end of school life as well as a new beginning of graduates’social life. Commencement speakers deliver speeches, influencing the opinions and behaviors of the graduating class. Commencement speeches have been studied from different perspectives, such as anthropology, stylistics, Systemic Functional Grammar and the like. However, little attention is paid to the analysis of commencement speeches from the perspective of Appraisal Theory.In order to find out how commencement speakers employ attitude resources to achieve instructive and persuasive purposes, the study selects30American universities’ commencement speeches delivered in the first half year of2011from the websites, and then carries out a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis on the selected materials based on attitude system with the assistance of UAM Corpus Tool. The major findings are summarized as follows:First, affect, judgment and appreciation resources are all employed in commencement speeches, but they are distributed unevenly. Appreciation outweighs other attitude resources, judgment ranks second and affect is the least frequently used one. Speakers are prone to convey appreciative attitudes towards objective world and convey their judgments of human behaviors to instruct and persuade the graduates.Second, within affect system, the subtype of un/happiness plays a dominant role in affect, which is correspondent to the happy atmosphere of commencement and also may make it easier for graduates to accept and follow their suggestions. Within judgment, capacity occurs most frequently within judgment system, followed by tenacity and propriety also accounting for a large proportion, with normality and veracity the least used in commencement speeches. As for appreciation, valuation outweighs reaction and composition in commencement speeches, which may reveal commencement speakers usually attach great importance to the value of entities and phenomena in order to draw the attention of graduates to these subjects.Third, there are far more inscribed attitude resources than invoked ones in commencement speeches, which makes it easy for the audience to better understand speeches. Consequently, the instructive and persuasive purposes can be better achieved. Within attitude system, positive evaluations play a dominant role in commencement speeches, which may show that the speakers tend to express pleasant emotions, evaluate behaviors optimistically and convey positive appreciative attitudes, spreading hopeful ideas to the graduates and urging them to deal with challenges more bravely and confidently.To sum up, affect, judgment and appreciation resources jointly realize the instructive and persuasive functions of commencement speeches. The current study may shed light on how to better understand and appreciate speeches as well as write a good speech and may verify the feasibility and applicability of Appraisal Theory to some extent and meanwhile enrich its application.