A Study Of Interpersonal Meaning Of Obama’s Political Speeches Based On The Appraisal Theory

Political speech is famous for its persuasiveness. Most linguists pay attention to its rhetorical characteristics, linguistic features and stylistic features, and some of them concern the research of interpersonal meaning in political discourse, but seldom study from the perspective of appraisal theory. This thesis takes President Obama’s political speech as the corpora, and discusses the interpersonal meaning of appraisal resources in the framework of Martin’s appraisal system.Appraisal theory is a new lexical grammatical framework based on the study of interpersonal meaning in systematic functional grammar. According to the evaluative object, appraisal resources can be divided into three categories: the emotional expression of individuals, affect; assessment of people’s character and behavior, judgment; and evaluation towards value of things, appreciation. And meanwhile, it can also be discussed from the perspective of grading and sources of voices, namely, attitude, engagement and graduation. This thesis studies President Obama’s speeches with the help of the software Ant Conc. Through the qualitative and quantitative analysis of appraisal resources in the thirty political speeches, we come to a conclusion that:Appraisal resources appear frequently with high interpersonal meaning in Obama’s political speeches. Attitude is the core of the entire appraisal system, in which evaluative language is employed to build attitudinal positioning. And more specifically, resources of affect, judgment and appreciation make it possible for the speaker to resonate and negotiate with listeners in the respect of emotion, ethics and social values. In engagement system, resources of dialogue contraction are richer than dialogue expansion, which indicates that the speaker is inclined to use contracting resources to unify the divergence so as to win the conversation. In graduation, attitude has been graded and the distribution of force resources is wider than focus, which is decided by the persuasive position of the speaker. However, all the appraisal resources do not exist independently, but intertwined to achieve the final purpose, persuasion.