The Evaluative Analysis Of Marked Themes In Political Discourse

The present thesis has employed Theme-Rheme theory and the concept of marked theme proposed by Halliday to explore the realization of evaluative meaning in political discourse. The researches on political discourse have drawn much attention. However, most of these researches are concerned with the positive discourse analysis, negative discourse analysis and attitude analysis of the political discourse. The present study is focused on the realization of dual demands of political discourse as objectivity and stance established by marked themes, based on which we associated the study of political discourse with marked themes and evaluation.Political makers adopt marked themes and evaluative strategies or devices to achieve the dual demands of political discourse in a neutral stance. The main purpose of this research is to analyze the evaluative meaning of marked themes in political discourse.By using Obama’s Weekly Radio Address as corpus, with descriptive method, this thesis tends to analyze the realization of interpersonal meaning of marked themes as point of departure of the clause. This paper argues that marked themes realize both textual function and interpersonal function which interplay with each other to coarticulate evaluation that encoded in political discourse. Through analysis of the realization of interpersonal prosody of marked themes, evaluative meanings of text result from accumulation, reinforcement and resonation of lexicogrammar.