A Comparative Study On Chinese And Western Top Leaders’ Political Speeches From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Appraisal is a vital means for the speaker to express his or her feelings and stances. As the development and extension of the interpersonal meaning in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, Appraisal Theory put forward by Martin and his colleagues in the 1990s has attracted the worldwide attention in current study. Appraisal Theory focuses upon the exploration of meanings of discourse and mainly studies attitude, engagement and graduation resources in a text. Attitude deals with our feelings toward people’s behavior and phenomena, and the emotional reaction. Engagement concerns the sources and voices of proposition. Graduation means to grade all the appraisal resources. Appraisal resources work together to express the speaker’s feelings and stances and to build certain type of interpersonal relationship with the audience.Political speech, as an important genre of public speaking, is delivered by the speaker with clear aims to state the political views, promote political guidelines, and influence the public. It plays an important role in the domestic and international political life. The evaluative resources in political speech are abundant and are crucial for the construction of speaker stances and relationships with the audience.The study attempts to apply Appraisal Theory to the comparative analysis of the New Year speeches delivered by the top leaders in three countries-China, the United States and the United Kingdom. It aims to reveal the appraisal resources distribution patterns in the political speeches, and to explore the means to fulfill political aims in the political speeches of the three countries.It is found that Chinese Presidents, American Presidents and British Prime Ministers tend to employ most attitude resources, medium graduation resources, and fewest engagement resources in their New Year speeches. Chinese Presidents prefer to use most attitude resources to express the speakers’ feelings toward certain things, fewest engagement resources to involve in the assertions, with big gaps between them. But the gaps between the proportions of attitude, engagement and graduation in American and British speeches are relatively small. Then in attitude system, Chinese Presidents use the most judgement resources, which reflect the big solidarity among speakers and the audience in Chinese culture; American Presidents employ the most affect resources, which show the rich emotional empathy with the public in American culture; British Prime Ministers use the most appreciation resources, which embody the more conservative culture in Britain. In engagement system, Chinese and American Presidents use more dialogic expansion resources than contraction resources, while British Prime Ministers apply quite even distribution between the two sub-systems. Such means opens up the dialogic space and helps the speaker to reduce the cost of responsibility in the assertion in order to win support. In graduation resources, the State leaders of the three countries prefer to use far more force resources than focus resources. It reflects that the speakers tend to modify their intensity of feelings to influence the public more effectively.The findings of the comparative study will give some implications for the research of Appraisal Theory and political speech discourse, and are also helpful for a better communication of people from Chinese and English speaking countries.