An Analysis Of Franklin D.Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats On Economic Revival—From The Perspective Of Engagement In Appraisal Theory

Appraisal Theory, first proposed by Martin in the early1990s, is an extension of interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics. It provides a most systematic approach to the study of discourse meaning. Appraisal is concerned with the linguistic formulations of conveying emotions and opinions, how writers align their authorial personae with other people’s stances, and how they manipulate their writings to convey strength and conviction in their propositions to a greater or lesser degree. Within the broad scope, Appraisal Theory is divided into three interacting domains, namely attitude, engagement and graduation.As a sub-genre of public speaking, the political speech, due to its unique feature of language, is employed by statesmen as a weapon to expound their political views, promote political guidelines, provoke emotion and win over the people, which not only plays a vital role in individual benefit but also conduces to the progress of the society. Any discourse by humans conveys the opinion and attitude of the writer/speaker to various events and objects in the objective world, so social function of political speech is performed by its own affect, attitude and stance so as to persuade the audience to trust the speaker and support him. Therefore, political speeches are rich in Appraisal resources.This thesis selects10speeches of American President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s classic Fireside Chats on economic revival as the study corpus. Based on the Appraisal Theory of Martin and White, this study conducts a quantitative and qualitative analysis in the10speeches with the total words of28,346from the perspective of the Heteroglossia of engagement by the application of the UAM Corpus Tool. The present study aims to probe into the engagement resources distributed in Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats and investigate the features of them so as to explore how the speaker negotiates with the potential audience with engagement resources and how Roosevelt achieves the evaluation and persuasiveness of his Fireside Chats.The conclusion indicates that the speaker makes full use of the engagement resources as a speaking strategy to express his attitude and viewpoint. Analysis shows that of the total1425engagement resources of the corpus, the dialogic contractive resources outnumber the dialogic expansive resources with the percentage of54.9%and45.1%respectively, making it a salient feature of Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. For each speech, the distribution of the subtypes of engagement resources generally takes on a similar tendency, which indicates that Roosevelt shows a preference to such paradigm to negotiate different voices explicitly or implicitly so as to align with the anticipated audience and win their support and trust subtly.This thesis makes a tentative study of Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats from the perspective of engagement. It has dual meaning in both theory and practice. On one hand, it proves the effectiveness and feasibility of the Appraisal Theory as a theoretical framework for discourse analysis, enriching its research in the field of English political speeches. On the other hand, it is also of great significance to learn the features of political speeches. And it also provides ways in better understanding of political speeches and speech writing.