A Comparative Study Of Political Speeches Of Chinese And American Leaders From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Appraisal Theory,as an extension and development of Systemic Functional Linguistics,is an important means to carry out discourse analysis and to realize interpersonal meaning.Since its establishment,it has been widely concerned by scholars at home and abroad.Appraisal Theory is an expression of interpersonal meaning at the level of textual semantics,including Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.Attitude system is concerned about people's emotions,including emotional reactions,behavioral assessment and appreciation of things or phenomena.Engagement system emphasizes the source of attitude and the heterogloss of discourse.Graduation system is to grade all evaluation resources.Political speeches are public speeches,which are made by politicians to demonstrate political stances,propagate political opinions and inspire people in their political activities.They play an important role in political activities both at home and abroad.However,due to the differences in cultures,values and political stances,etc.in different nations,they naturally vary in interpersonal meaning at the level of textual semantics.Therefore,it is necessary to do a comparative analysis of political speeches of diverse political backgrounds to find out differences and similarities in the realization of interpersonal meanings.In this study,ten samples are chosen at random from the political speeches,5 from President Xi Jinping's speeches and 5 from President Obama's.The author applies Appraisal Theory to the comparative analysis of Chinese and American leaders' political speeches,and adopts the quantitative method to reveal the similarities and differences between the Chinese and American political texts and explore how appraisal resources realize the interpersonal meaning and political purpose.It is found that Chinese and American leaders have a lot in common in using appraisal resources,and meanwhile,there are also some differences.The findings are as follows:The frequency of use of the three subsystems of appraisal resources in the Chineseleader's political speeches from high to low is attitude,graduation and engagement resources.American's is attitude,engagement and graduation resources.Both the Chinese leader and the leader of the United States use the most attitude resources to express their emotions and stances.The difference is that the Chinese leader uses more graduation resources than engagement resources,while the American leader uses more engagement resources.In the aspect of attitude system,there are some similarities in both kinds of political speeches.The largest proportion is appreciation resources,followed by affect resources,and the smallest part is judgment resources.Moreover,a large number of positive appraisal resources are adopted by Chinese and American leaders.They use positive appraisal to shape the good image of their peoples,and create a harmonious interpersonal atmosphere to win the audience support.As for Engagement,Chinese and American leaders are more inclined to use the dialogic contraction of engagement.In Dialogic Contraction,both of them tend to use deny resources.However,the US leader extensively uses the deny items in his political speeches,which reflects Obama and American's strong sense of superiority because of the international status of the United States in the world.In the expansion of the dialogue,both sides use more entertain resources.In Graduation,there are far more force resources than focus resources in both Chinese and American leaders' political speeches.Of them,quantitative resources are more used,but there is no great gap between quantitative resources and intensification resources.It may imply that the speakers are trying to show the specific effort made on the relevant issue through the entity.In terms of focus resources,both Chinese and American leaders tend to use softening resources and express the uncertainty about numbers through the use of some hedging language to reflect their rigorous attitude.The application of Appraisal Theory to the comparative analysis of Chinese and American leaders' political speeches in this study hopefully may contribute to the broadening of the scope of the application of Appraisal Theory,and may provideimplications for further study of appraisal theory and political speech.What's more,it may be of some help to the Chinese readers to better understand the US political speech discourses,so as to promote more effective communication between the Chinese people and American people.