Positive Discourse Analysis Of Bill Gates’s Educational Speech Based On Attitude System

The thought-provoking speeches may inspire us. They play important roles in ourhistory and social development. As one of the most important written or spoken texttypes, the speech has a great impact on large numbers of people, which makes it worthexploring. There are many previous studies on public speeches. Some focused on thetheory, the skills of speech-making, the language style, the rhetoric devices, etc., whileothers concentrated on the different kinds of speeches, especially political speeches,economic speeches, academic speeches; but few are about educational speeches,therefore, this paper practically analyzes educational speeches. The data are chosen fromeducational speeches given by Bill Gates who is one of the most influential andsuccessful persons in the world according to Forbes Magazine. His speeches are full ofinnovation and wisdom. His words and behavior have encouraged many people and evenchanged the lifestyle and thoughts of them. To some extent, he has changed the world.The perspective of Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA), which was first proposed byJ. R. Martin in1999, is complementary to Critical Discourse Analysis. It maintains thattexts have constructive functions, and advocates using a positive reform or peacefulsolution to address social issues. Aiming at building a harmonious and beautifulcommunity by discourse analysis, it is mainly used to analyze those discourses thatcontain political factors, such as, discourses of diplomacy, mediation, negotiation,conference, and consultation, etc. Therefore, using PDA to analyze educational speechesis relatively a fresh try.One of the subsystems of Appraisal Theory—Attitude System was employed as thetheoretical framework of the dissertation. Based on two research questions, thisdissertation analyzes three sub-systems of attitude system in detail. Both quantitative andqualitative methods were adopted to analyze the data. Quantitative approach was used toquantify the distribution and frequency of these attitudinal resources by calculating thedata; the qualitative approach was employed to analyze the data in each subsystem ofAttitude System, showing how these appraisal sources were employed to construct thediscourse and express the speaker’s attitude.Based on a detailed analysis, it is found that positive words are more frequentlyused than negative words in the data. Among the three sub-systems of attitude system,appreciation is the most frequently used attitudinal resources, judgement the second and affect the least. As for parts of speech, the adjective is the most frequently used. However,other parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs and adverbs are also used to express thespeaker’s attitude and opinions in accordance with the need of different context. Theattitudinal vocabulary has been used directly to express the speaker’s attitude, but somewords have been employed indirectly, which means that context needs to be taken intoconsideration when the research was conducted.