| American President Obama’s Inaugural Address has attracted enormousacademic attention ever since its delivery. A certain number of researchers haveundertaken tentative investigations into the translation of President Obama’sInaugural Address, yet few of the studies have been conducted within the frameworkof Appraisal Theory. In the view of discourse analysis for political address, thespeaker employs evaluative items to convey his/her viewpoints and attitudes for thepurpose of influencing the audience and managing interpersonal relationships. As anextension of research on the interpersonal function within Systemic FunctionalLinguistics, Appraisal Theory is concerned with the linguistic resources throughwhich a speaker/writer expresses and negotiates attitudes either explicitly or implicitly,and it has been widely applied to various kinds of discourse analysis. Hence it isreasonable to expect that Appraisal Theory can offer insight into the translation of thelinguistic resources that reflect Obama’s attitudes in his Inaugural Address.Nevertheless, scholars including Martin (2000), Wang Zhenhua (2001) and ZhuYongsheng (2009) have proposed that most of the studies on Appraisal Theory arelimited to evaluative lexis and largely focused on explicit evaluation rather thanimplicit one. Grounded on this, it is stated in the present thesis that studies ofattitudinal meaning should not be restricted to isolated lexis. Rather, there should be atight combination of lexis, grammar, and co-text for a better interpretation of invokedAttitude.Adopting as the research data the transcript of President Obama’s InauguralAddress delivered on January20,2009and its authoritative Chinese version providedby U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs, thepresent thesis unfolds an exploration into the translation of the attitudinal invocationsin Obama’s Inaugural Address within the Attitude system of Appraisal Theory. Theattitudinal invocations in the source text are realized through seemingly descriptivelexis and semantic structures endowed with attitudinal implication. This thesis employs centrally a qualitative research and focuses on a detailed examination of howObama conveyed his invoked Attitude by using attitudinal resources and how well thetarget text constructs the invoked attitudinal meaning in the source text.It is discovered from the research that among all the32attitudinal invocations,positive invocations are more favored than negative ones due to Obama’s intention tolay emphasis on “hope” and “confidence” during the time of national recession. Heemployed strategies including frequent use of Force and Focus as well as non-corewords, lexical metaphors, attitudinal prosody and grammatical means such asrepetition and parallel structures for the expression of Affect, Judgement andAppreciation. The target text fulfills proper constructions of the invoked Attitude to acertain degree, yet outnumbered by the improper constructions. In order to maintainequivalent Attitude to that of the source text, the target text makes its best effortsthrough various grammatical means together with some adjustments like changing thepart of speech of a word or transferring an Appreciation resource to an Affect orJudgement one. Nevertheless, the target text still partly lowers some Attitude valuesor makes them higher than those of the source text.To sum up, the present thesis illustrates that for one thing, Appraisal Theory canshed light on the interpretation of the attitudes and ideology of a discourse; foranother, Appraisal Theory is effective in assessing the target text of the very discourse.That is to say, it enables an examination of whether the target text has grasped thoseattitudes invoked in the source text and constructed them properly or not. Besides, thisthesis further clarifies that researching implicit Attitude is of undeniable significancein the development of Appraisal Theory. |
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