Analysis Of The Attitudinal Meanings In Discourses Of Political Speeches From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Appraisal System(AS)---as a new method of discourse analysis,is a lexical-grammatical framework developing from the interpersonal function in Systemic Functional Grammar.It is used for studying how the speaker/writer expresses the attitudes,makes evaluation,and maintains the interpersonal relationship.Attitude System---as the core of AS can be further classified into: Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.For the past few years,Attitude System has been employed to analyze different kinds of discourses,such as editorial texts,commercial advertisements,law regulations and humorous discourses.However,it is rarely used for analyzing political speeches especially political speeches given by Prime Minister Cameron.By employing the subsystem of J.R.Martin's AS---Attitude System to analyze Prime Minister Cameron's political speeches,this study aims to find out the distributional characteristics of discourses and reveal how the speaker expresses his political attitudes,builds and maintains the interpersonal relationship with the audiences.The present study tries to answer the following questions: what kinds of attitudinal resources the political speeches by David Cameron use and what about their distributions;how the interpersonal meaning is realized through the attitudinal resources in the speeches.Selecting 10 pieces of Cameron's political speeches from the website of British government,the present study has drawn the following conclusions through careful identifications,classifications and analysis:Firstly,there are numerous attitudinal resources.Three subsystems of Attitude System---Affect,Judgment and Appreciation are all involved in the corpus.Secondly,the subsystem of Attitude System and its sub-types are distributed unevenly.The Appreciation ranks first in the highest proportion and the values of Judgment and Affect come next.Valuation outweighs the other two categories in Appreciation.In terms of Judgment,Capacity is at the top of Judgment in frequencies of occurrence.Within the framework of Affect,Dis/inclination ranks in first place.Thirdly,we can see how the linguistics resources in Cameron's political speeches are applied to realize the interpersonal meaning through the analysis.(1)The extensive application of the attitudinal resources increases the persuasion and readability to thespeeches.(2)The speeches are preferred to use the seemingly “objective” Appreciation to add the objectivity and influence of it.(3)The positive attitudinal resources are employed in a large scale while the negative ones also play the important function.(4)“Inclination”,“capacity” and “valuation” take the dominant position in the three subsystems of the Attitude System.Analyzing Cameron's political speeches by Attitude System expands the horizon of application of Appraisal Theory from the theoretical perspectives.In practices,it is beneficial to write the speech and polish people's speech skill.What's more,it helps the public understand the true intentions.The present paper is composed of five parts: the first chapter is concerned about the introduction to research background,goals,significances and the organization.The second chapter makes a summary on the previous studies of Attitude System and political speeches.The third chapter deals with the research methodology,procedure and elaborates Attitude system in detailed.The forth chapter analyses the distributional characteristics of attitudinal system in discourses.The last chapter deals with the research results and points out the limitations,implications and suggestions for further study.