Attitude Resources In State Of The Union Addresses From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

The present study attempts to explore the attitude resources employed in State of the Union Addresses delivered by President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2014, using the Appraisal Theory as the informing theoretical framework. Appraisal theory, developed by Martin and his colleagues within the Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL), extends the interpretation of the interpersonal metafunction to the level of discourse semantics and is an attempt to provide a comprehensive framework for analyzing evaluation in discourse. The Appraisal System consists of attitude, engagement and graduation. And as for the data, there are two reasons for the author to choose the State of the Union Addresses delivered by President Barack Obama: first, as a kind of political speeches, the State of the Union Address is rich in interpersonal meanings; second, how Obama deploys the attitude resources to calm down and encourage the public in the addresses is worth studying.The study attempts to answer the following three research questions: first, what attitude resources are employed in the State of the Union Addresses delivered by President Obama? How are they distributed in the addresses? Second, what are the general features of the attitude resources in the State of the Union Addresses delivered by President Obama? Third, what are the functions of the attitude resources in the State of the Union Addresses delivered by President Obama?Methodologically speaking, the present study adopts the combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods so as to conduct the analysis scientifically. First, with the assistance of the UAM Corpus Tool(Version 2.8.14), the attitude resources in the six addresses delivered by President Obama are identified and categorized based on the attitude system. Then, descriptive statistics of affect, judgement and appreciation and their subsystems are produced by the UAM Corpus Tool for quantitative analysis. Finally, qualitative analysis reveals the features and functions of the attitude resources employed in State of the Union Addresses.The findings of the study demonstrate that among the three subsystems of attitude, appreciation is the most frequently employed while affect is used the least frequently, with judgement standing in the middle. And as for the loading feature of all the attitude resources, 70.39% of the attitude resources employed in the addresses are positive while only 29.61% are negative. And the positive attitude resources are mainly employed for popularizing Obama’s programs and boosting the American people’s confidence. Of all the attitude resources employed in the addresses, 71.46% of the attitude resources are explicitly inscribed while 28.54% are invoked. Metaphors, the selection of ideational meanings and counter-expectancy have been adopted for invoking evaluations. The attitude resources employed mainly serve to popularize Obama’s reforms and economic recovery measures, calm down the public in face of the economic crisis and the present situations and deal with the bipartisan issues.The study aims to test the applicability of Appraisal Theory in analyzing political speeches and benefit English learners in understanding the State of the Union Addresses. However, it has certain limitations with respect to the amount of the data and the aspects of study. A more comprehensive study which includes attitude, engagement and graduation would yield a more persuasive conclusion.