A Contrastive Analysis Of The New Year Blessings By Chinese And American Presidents In The Framework Of The Appraisal Theory

The New Year Blessing is a kind of speech delivered by the head of a nation at the turn of the New Year, expressing the state’s positions on some important issues and trying to consolidate the relationship with the public. Recently, the New Year Blessings delivered by the state leaders have gained more and more attention from the academic community and become a new research hotspot. This thesis tries to make a contrastive analysis into the New Year blessings delivered by Chinese and American Presidents under the framework of the Appraisal Theory.The Appraisal Theory is an extension of the research about the interpersonal function in the framework of the Systemic Functional Linguistics. This theory contains three systems: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. This thesis divides the blessings into two groups: the Chinese Group, and the American Group. With the help of the UAM Corpus Tool, this thesis analyzes 20 New Year Blessings(10 for each group) delivered by Chinese Presidents and American Presidents in the framework of the Appraisal Theory, trying to explore the distribution features, similarities and differences in the use of the appraisal resources and the way in which the interpersonal function is realized.After the contrastive analysis, the following conclusions are drawn. Among the three systems, it is Attitude that ranks the first in frequency in the two groups, showing that Presidents of both nations pay great attention to the states’ positions in their blessings. Within the system of Attitude, the positive appraisal resources take an overwhelming place in both groups, which shows that the Presidents of the two nations try to win positive attitude, support and trust from the public; the uses of the three types of Attitude, namely Affect, Judgment and Appreciation are found to be different from each other: Affect takes a larger proportion in the American blessings than in their Chinese counterparts; both the percentages of Judgment and Appreciation in the New Year Blessings delivered by Chinese Presidents are higher than the corresponding proportions in the American Group. As for the use of the Engagement resources, there is no obvious difference. The Presidents of both nations use Expansions more than Contractions, aiming to open up to the people with different voices and aligning them into their own positions. With respect to the Graduation resources, they are more frequently adopted by Chinese Presidents than American Presidents. This present study finds out that the New Year Blessings delivered by Chinese and American Presidents are characterized by differences between the Chinese and American cultures: Americans are more willing to reveal their personal emotions, while Chinese people prefer to make judgments and assessments.The thesis makes a deep and systematic analysis of the New Year Blessings delivered by Chinese and American Presidents under the Appraisal Theory, and reveals the similarities and differences of the appraisal resources between the two groups. The findings of the present thesis can help people to better understand the New Year Blessings delivered by Chinese and American Presidents, especially the cultural differences between the two nations.