An Analysis Of Obama’s Chicago Speech From The Perspective Of The Appraisal Theory

The Appraisal Theory is a new development of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It is a newlexico-grammatical framework developed from the study of the interpersonal meaning inSystemic Functional Linguistics, and it is concerned with various negotiable attitudes in adiscourse. The Appraisal Theory includes three parts: attitude, engagement and graduation.And in each part, several branches are included. With the development of the AppraisalTheory, it is applied in each field extensively, especially in discourse analysis, however, thereare few applications of this theory into political speech in China. This thesis is an attempt tomake a detailed analysis of American president Barack Obama’s Chicago speech from theperspective of the Appraisal Theory. This thesis adopts quantitative and qualitative methods tostudy the distribution and function of appraisal resources in this discourse. We can find fromthe study that attitudinal resources are widely applied in the discourse; affect resources prevailamong the attitude system, appreciation is in the second place, and judgment resources arerelatively less. Positive attitude resources outnumber negative resources and explicit attituderesources outnumber implicit resources. The analysis of engagement resources show thewhole discourse is contractive rather than expansive. With respect to graduation, we can findthat the author likes to use force resources rather than focus resources. This thesisdemonstrates that the application of the Appraisal Theory to discourse analysis is feasible andpoints out some limitations of this field for us to explore.