Positive Discourse Analysis Of Attitudinal Resources In Chinese And English Political Discourse

Government Work Report of China (GWR) is China’s official document delivered annually by the Primer on behalf of the State Council for the deliberation and approval of the deputy of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). State of the Union Address (SUA) is presented by the President of the United States to a joint session of the United States Congress, typically delivered annually. SUA and GWR, possessing abundant interpersonal meanings, are frequently regarded as a type of political discourse very similar in their content and characteristics. Political discourses are the process that the addressers pass their attitudes toward people, entity or behavior to the audience. However, due to differences in the political systems of the two counties, interpersonal meaning varies greatly from Chinese political discourse to English political discourse.With Systemic Functional Linguistics as basis, Appraisal Theory is a new approach for studying interpersonal meaning. It is focused on the writer’s or speaker’s positive or negative attitude to persons, places, entities, events, phenomena and the ways in which the writer or speaker conveys his or her attitudes and positions. Appraisal system contains three subsystems:Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation. This thesis is only an attempt to study the attitude system. At present, the materials selected for Appraisal research always concern with news report, political speech, but rarely with the positive discourse analysis of Chinese and English political discourse such as GWR and SUA. Therefore, this thesis aims to fill the vacancy from the perspective of positive discourse analysis. Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA), which treats the text’s socially constructional function positively, comes from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). PDA advocates the positive reform and puts forward the solution in a peaceful way.Within the framework of Appraisal theory, this thesis, by adopting the qualitative method, aims to explore the use of Appraisal resources in GWR and SUA, especially in the following aspects:the similarities and differences of using Appraisal resources in GWR and SUA, how to realize the interpersonal meaning by using Appraisal resources. From the comparative studies of GWR and SUA, the findings of this research can be summarized as follows:First, a large number of Attitude resources are used in both SUA and GWR, but the proportion of Attitude resources in SUA is higher. Secondly, within the Attitude system, Appreciation resources are preferably used in SUA and GWR. There is no significant difference in the use of Affect and Judgement value. Third, within the Judgement subsystem, GWR employs more Composition resources while SUA uses more Valuation resources. The application of Attitude resources in political discourse shortens the distance between government and the public, helping to build a more harmonious society.All in all, this thesis is an attempt to apply the Appraisal Theory to political discourse analysis from the perspective of PDA and provide some valuable information and suggestions for related research.