An Analysis On Engagement Resources In Informative English Speeches From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Appraisal theory, developed from the interpersonal studies within systemic--functional linguistics, is a new lexical-grammatical framework which attends to all sorts of negotiable attitudes in discourse. Appraisal theory includes three sub-systems: “attitude”, “engagement” and “graduation”. Engagement system mainly focuses on heterogloss and the realization of interpersonal meaning in discourses. Informative English speech, as an important way to convey information, is the most familiar and popular type of public speaking. Therefore, the research on engagement resources in informative English speeches is of theoretical and practical significance. However, research on informative speech under the framework of engagement theory is rare. This thesis aims to explore the engagement resources used in informative English speeches, thus illustrating the existence of heterogloss in informative speech and analyzing its interpersonal meaning.The author selects 60 informative English speeches from the official website of TED talks. The informative speeches in the corpus cover technology, entertainment, design, business, culture and education, and all the texts are manually annotated(154,157 words in total). The research on the distribution of engagement resources will be conducted according to Martin’s engagement theory. Besides linguistic statistical software UAM corpus tool is adopted as assistant tool to get the distribution and frequency of engagement resources, and then qualitative analysis is performed to analyze their interpersonal meanings.The result of this research shows that the speakers employ all types of engagement resources, but the proportion of each resource differs. In the whole engagement system, dialogic contraction resources are used more frequently than dialogic expansion resources. In dialogic contraction, disclaim has a higher frequency compared with proclaim, while in dialogic expansion, entertain has a higher frequency. Deny, counter, and entertain are the major engagement resources used in the speeches. In informative English speeches, the speakers use more dialogic contraction resources to contract the dialogic space and exclude certain outside voices, thus making their voices more powerful and authoritative. At the same time, they occasionally use dialogic expansion to open up the dialogic space, making their viewpoints or stances more objective and acceptable to the audiences.This thesis is a tentative study which attempts to make contributions to the research of engagement resources in informative English speeches within the field of appraisal theory. Moreover, it is hoped that this thesis can help the speaker get a better understanding of engagement resources used in informative English speeches.