| This paper takes appraisal theory—a new development of systemic functional linguistics as the framework to analyze the appraisal words in the UK and US leaders'speeches,aiming to find out their distributions,and their differences and similarities,and to make clear how the speakers express their emotions,attitudes and standpoints in political speeches to realize the social and interpersonal functions of speeches.With AntConc and SPSS software,this paper analyzes the lexical features of appraisal words in the UK and US leaders' speeches in 160 speech texts in terms of the three systems of appraisal theory—attitude,engagement and graduation by means of quantitative and qualitative analysis.It is found out that the UK and US leaders'speeches have the following characteristics.Firstly,both UK and US leaders employ a lot of appraisal words in their speeches and positive words are much more frequently used than negative words.Secondly,in the three subsystems,engagement words enjoy a higher percentage followed by attitude and graduation words.In attitude system,there are much more judgment words than affect and appreciation words.In engagement system,heterogloss is more frequently used.There is a significant difference in the employment of dialogic expansion and dialogic contraction in the UK and US leaders' speeches.In graduation system,force outnumbers focus.Thirdly,the main difference between the UK and US leaders' speeches is that the US leaders are more in favor of appraisal words than the UK leaders.In engagement system,UK leaders employ more dialogic expansion while the US leaders use more dialogic contraction.This paper hopes to offer the readers a new perspective of appreciating speeches,especially political speeches,in terms of word usage so as to better understand the author's intention.At the same time,this paper also provides the readers scientific evidence in the reading of political speeches.Besides,it can give people some guidance on making a speech. |
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