A Study Of The Attitudinal Meaning In Obama’s2013Inaugural Address From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Barack Obama is the first African-American President of the United States. Obama is a great orator and his oration contributes much to his success. His first inaugural address has attracted enormous academic attention both abroad and at home ever since its delivery in2009, but there are few linguistic researches concerning his second inaugural address. Therefore, this thesis intends to find out how Obama expresses his attitude successfully in his2013Inaugural Address to build his image and affect the voters’ opinions, which results in a solid alignment with the audience.In the1990s James Martin and other functional linguists put forward the Appraisal Theory, which offers people a new approach to study Appraisal linguistic resources from the lexical level rather than the clause level. It is considered as an extension and supplement of Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Linguistics. Appraisal system is made up of three sub-systems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. The Attitude system is further divided into Affect, Judgement and Appreciation which relates to psychological, ethical and aesthetic domains respectively. The three sub-categories interconnect with one another into a complete system for evaluating the Attitudinal linguistic resources in the discourses. After the Attitudinal linguistic resources in Obama’s2013inaugural address are collected, described and analyzed with the employment of Attitude system, this thesis aims to find out their distributive features, offer the relevant explanations, and summarize the chief Attitudinal meanings expressed in the speech. In the analysis, both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted.Finally the following findings are identified. First, Attitudinal evaluations abound in this speech. The three categories of Attitudinal resources (Affect, Judgement and Appreciation) all appear in this address, and each of them account for approximately the same proportion. Second, in terms of the loading of Attitude, positive Attitudinal resources surpass the negative ones; with regard to the mode of expressions, explicit Attitudinal resources outnumber the implicit ones. Positive Attitudinal meanings, especially positive Affect in terms of Security, positive Judgement in terms of Tenacity and positive Appreciation in terms of Valuation are much employed in this speech. The purpose is to encourage the Americans to have enough confidence and motivation to face the crises, and stick to the democratic tradition and constitutional spirit inherited from the forerunners. Third, Attitudinal meaning is mainly realized through three parts of speech:nouns, adjectives and verbs.This thesis validates the applicability and feasibility of the Attitude system in analyzing the Attitudinal meaning of a special kind of political speeches-American presidential inaugural addresses, and provides some valuable insights into English language learning and Appraisal research.