A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American State Leaders’ Campus Speeches: From The Appraisal-engagement Perspective

The present study attempts to explore the distributive features and strategicdeployment of Engagement resources in Chinese and American state leaders’intercultural campus speeches. The Engagement sub-system of Appraisal systemproposed by Martin and White (2005) is adopted as the theoretical framework. Andthe data for the study is twenty intercultural campus speeches given by Chinese andAmerican state leaders from2003to2013.Two steps are involved in the analysis of the data. Firstly, a quantitative analysisis carried out to examine the distributive features of Engagement resources. Thestatistics show that Chinese and American state leaders use more Contractiveresources than Expansive resources, more Disclaim resources than Proclaim resources,more Entertain resources than Attribute resources, more Acknowledge values thanDistance values and modality is used most frequently in the sub-type of Entertain.However, the total number of Engagement resources in American state leaders’intercultural campus speeches is nearly twice as much as that in Chinese counterparts.Besides, Deny values are used more frequently than Counter values in Englishspeeches while the case is just the opposite in Chinese speeches. Secondly, aqualitative analysis is conducted to explore the strategic deployment of Engagementresources. The results show that both Chinese and American state leaders tend tostrengthen the speaker-hearer alignment through pronominal reference. They also liketo cite well-known sayings or proverbs of the host countries to shorten the distancebetween the speaker and the audience. Nevertheless, there are some differences in therealizations of Entertain, Acknowledge and Concur. Moreover, some of the citationsin Chinese campus speeches are recessive while the sources of the citations in Englishcampus speeches are mentioned explicitly.The similarities of Engagement resources in Chinese and American state leaderscan be attributed to the characteristics and purpose of the campus speech and the differences may due to the differences of culture, ideology and foreign policy betweenChina and America.As a tentative study, the thesis attempts to contribute to the further research ofintercultural campus speeches within the filed of Appraisal Theory. It is also hopedthat the thesis can help the public to better understand state leaders’ interculturalcampus speeches.