A Positive Discourse Analysis Of President Obama’s State Of The Union Address Of2013—from The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

As the administrative program of the United States, State of the Union Address (SUA) mainly introduces various tough issues confronted by the president and the solutions will be adopted; in the meanwhile, SUA plays an important role for the president to introspect misconducts of himself and rebuilt confidence of his people. In SUA, the president is supposed to not only give a summary of the past, but also elaborate his ideas and policies for the future work with respect to various issues, such as economy, education, national security, science and technology, etc. In view of its significance for scholars to interpret the domestic and foreign policies of the United States, SUA is bound to attract the attention of the world as it is issued. A better understanding of this kind of speech enables listeners to grasp the development of the president’s policies as well as the stances held by him. The present thesis is directed towards carrying out a Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA) on SUA, in an attempt to further reveal the information hidden behind the SUA and to provide some new ideas for the discourse analysis of this kind of political speech. Besides, the present research tries to reveal how President Obama has effectively used various positive appraisal resources to achieve alignments with listeners and to eliminate divergences in the American society, so as to provide some suggestions for those people who are interested in public speech or whose work is related to public speech to improve their interpersonal skills and to get more supports from their listeners.Literature research shows that great efforts have been made by scholars in studying political speeches, especially those delivered by the presidents of the United States. The SUA speech, as the most important one of them, certainly has attracted a lot of scholars’attentions. However, it turns out that most of the nearly70pieces of core academic journal papers involved with SUA studies during recent10years are from the perspective of political commentary while less than10of them are based on linguistics. Furthermore, politics related discourse analysis studies are mostly Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) ones while PDA can barely be found. Therefore, the present thesis tries to carry out a PDA analysis on President Obama’s SUA speech by the virtue of Martin’s Appraisal Theory, in an effort to figure out the positive resources in his speech and to reveal how the President has tried to achieve solidarity with listeners. Appraisal Theory comprises three sub-systems which are Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, and the present research will centers on the three sub-systems.Taking the relatively long text and the timeliness of SUA into consideration, this thesis has chosen President Obama’s SUA of2013as the corpus with an effort to analyze the features of the President’s lexical strategy in the selected text through a detailed study.After a relatively comprehensive analysis of the selected text, it can be found that President Obama has used a lot of positive appraisal resources in his SUA speech, which are significant for him to align listeners, eliminate divergences in society and build listeners’confidence; in the meanwhile, the present research has revealed some weaknesses of Appraisal Theory and PDA in discourse analysis, which needs to be further perfected in the future study.