An Appraisal Analysis Of Speech By Obama In China

Political speech is usually persuasive on national affairs and foreign relations. Campaign speech, administration speech, inauguration speech are mainly political. Those famous politicians are specially proficient in making speeches.Sina-US relations can be described as wide fluctuation with Obama came into office. During his early days in office, the US economy was seriously affected by the subprime crisis and US domestic economy lagged behind with a continuous decline in domestic employent rate; therefore, Obama Administration needed the help and support from China, which drove US to develop bilateral relations with China actively, causing a good beginning. As the first African-American president, he made an instant visit to China and made the important speech at Shanghai Science&Technology Museum. Based on Martin’s Appraisal Theory, the present study chooses Obama’s first public speech in China as the research object and aims at exploring the distribution and realization of appraisal resources in political speeches.The theoretical framework of this study is Martin’s Appraisal Theory, which is a newly-developed lexico-grammatical framework for studying interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics. It is employed to analyze the interpersonal function at the discourse semantic level and is concerned with varieties attitudes negotiable in a text. More specifically, the theory explores how people express their attitude, judgement and appreciation and how to realize potential interactiona and empathy with others. The Appraisal Theory consists of three sub-systems, namely, attitude, engagement and graduation. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are adopted in the study. Quantitative method is employed to make a statistical analysis of the distribution of appraisal resources. On the other hand, qualitative method is employed to provide revelant and reasonable explanations for logical arguments.In this thesis, by applying the above stated methodology, several features are found out in the process of analyzing the appraisal resources in the speech. First, the political speech is found to contain a large amount of attitudinal resources. In the speech, attitudial resources occur many times. Meanwhile, the distritutions and frequencies of all sub-systems of attitude are not well-proportioned. The proportion of affect outnumber those of appreciation and judgement. As for the realization of appreciation, the canonical grammatical realization is adjectival. Positive attitudinal assessments outnumber the negative ones; similarly, explicit attitudinal assessments are more than implicit ones.With respect to engagement, both contractive resources and expansive resources are employed to establish negotiation with Chinese audience, deepening the understanding. Besides, up-scaling graduation resources interweave with attitudinal and engagement resources so as to convince more Chinese youth on site of Obama’s viewpoints being advanced.The significance of the study is evident. On one hand, such a research will help students comprehend the presidential speech more deeply and help them grasp the attitudinal meanings in the presidential speech more easily. What’s more, the present thesis demonstrates that Appraisal Theory, as a new linguistic theory, can be effectively applied to the analysis of discourse. It proves suitable to be used to analyze the U.S.presidential speech to Chinese students. Thus in turn, it provides a new perspective to study presidential speech. The thesis validates the application and feasibility of the Appraisal Theory in political speeches, meanwhile provides valuable insights into English language learning as well as intercultural communication.The whole thesis consists of five parts. Part one is a brief introduction. It states the study background, significance of study and organization of the thesis. Part two is literature review which summarizes the previous research of political public speech and the appraisal theory. Part three gives a detailed introduction of appraisal theory. Part four applies the sub-system of attitude, judgement and engagement to analyze the data, describing the features of the ways of expressing and explaining the reasons in the meantime. Part five summarizes and discusses the major findings of the research and makes a conclusion for the whole thesis.It also states the limitation and the suggestions for the future research.