| The State of the Union Address is the annual report made to Congress byAmerican President at the beginning of each year. It is known as the administrativeprogram of the US government, aiming to clarify the situation faced by the Presidentat home and abroad as well as policies and measures to be taken by the government.Based on Martin’s Appraisal Theory, taking the State of the Union Address as theresearch data, this study intends to explore and analyze the distribution of appraisalresources and the reasons behind the distribution.Appraisal Theory, which is proposed by James R. Martin and his colleagues, is anew development to study interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics.It studies the attitude towards other people and things conveyed by language usersthrough language, the source of attitudes and the extent of involved feelings.Appraisal Theory is made up of three sub-systems—Attitude, Engagement andGraduation. Attitude refers to the feelings of speakers for the participants (people,objects, events). Engagement is concerned with the way and extent of discourse inwhich the speakers participate. Graduation is used to describe the scale of attitudefrom strong to weak. Since it is first put forward, Appraisal Theory has been widelyapplied to analyze the various genres, such as news, advertisements, political speech,etc. However, Appraisal Theory is scarcely applied to study the State of the UnionAddress.Based on Appraisal theory, the present study has analyzed the fifteen State ofthe Union Addresses which are collected from one websitehttp://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/sou.php. The purpose is to explore and reveal thedistribution of appraisal resources appearing in the15State of the Union Addresses.Besides, the research tries to find out the reasons of such distribution of differentappraisal resources. The qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted in the thesisto summarize the following findings.By analysis and discussion, the thesis finds out that appreciative resources(58.55%) are the most frequently used in terms of the attitudinal resources, accounting for the largest proportion. And they are frequently used for the evaluationof the American government plans and reform programs. Judgmental resources(29.52%) occupy the second largest part. And they are mostly used to stress thecommon values in the USA and the behaviors contributing to the diplomatic relationsbetween the USA and other foreign countries. Affective resources (11.93%) take upthe lowest proportion. And they are almost used to emphasize the desire of solvingthe political, economic, military, and diplomatic problems. And in the15SUAs, mostof the attitudinal resources are positive.Meanwhile, in terms of the engagement resources, the heterogloss resourcesare more frequently used than the monogloss resources. In the whole heteroglossresources, modality (72.09%) accounts for the largest proportion. And the use ofmodality resources can introduce other voices and make the SUAs more objective.Concession (20.85%) takes up the second largest proportion and projection (7.06%)is the least frequently used. The concession and projection resources can make thespeakers’ views much easier to be accepted. Moreover, as for graduation resources,force resources (98.14%) are more frequently used than focus resources (1.86%%).And graduation resources help strengthen the speakers’ standpoints and ensure theobjectivity of the State of the Union Addresses.Theoretical and practical significance can be obtained from the research. On onehand, the appraisal analysis of the State of the Union Address can broaden theresearch field of Appraisal Theory and provide a new perspective for discourseanalysis. On the other hand, this research can not only help English learners knowabout the features and style of State of the Union Address and American socialculture, but also help them understand the political discourse deeply. Thus, the studyresults can shed light on language learning and political discourse interpretation. |
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