Positive Discourse Analysis Of Bill Gates And Melinda's 2014 Commencement Speech In Stanford

This research makes an attempt to make a positive discourse analysis(PDA)of Bill Gates and Melinda's 2014 Commencement Speech at Stanford.As a supplement and development of CD A,PDA was initially put forward by J.R.Martin in his work Positive Discourse Analysis:Solidarity and Change at Birmingham International Critical Discourse Analysis Conference in 1999.Positive discourse analysis puts an emphasis on looking at various problems with a positive attitude,in order to find out"good news" of the society instead of "bad news".It emphasizes passing on positive energy in a constructive way so as to promote social harmony and stability.As one variant of educational public speech,commencement speech is of crucial significance for those graduates who are going to set foot in the society.Bill Gates and Melinda are quite familiar to us,and what they have done or are doing impress us a lot,no matter business or charity.Therefore,their own experiences are really of great inspiration to the graduates.Appraisal theory is one appraisal mode evolving from Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL),and was not completed and improved until Martin and White published their Appraisal Theory:Appraisal in English in 2005.This paper tries to analyze the joint application of attitudinal,engagement and graduation resources in the commencement speech,in order to discover their feasibility in commencement speech,especially that of engagement and graduation resources,and to provide relevant references for future studies.This paper puts an emphasis on analyzing the distribution features of the three appraisal resources in the commencement speech,and then makes an analysis of the reasons and functions of such distributions,which can provide guidance for the listeners in how to listen to a commencement speech in a better way or understand the spirit and significance of the speech.Through analysis,it is discovered that attitudinal and graduation resources account for a great larger proportion than engagement,and there is only monogloss within engagement being applied in the speech,the application of heterogloss is rare,which is quite different from that in other public speeches,and this is also related to the nature of commencement speech.Major findings of the paper are as follows:(1)Within the attitudinal resource,affect,judgment and appreciation are all applied,with judgment accounting for the largest proportion.Within the affect system,happiness/unhappiness accounts for a much larger proportion than security/insecurity and satisfaction/dissatisfaction,while positive words or phrases are more often applied than negative ones;as for the judgment system,social esteem accounts for a larger proportion than social sanction,and normality and capacity are of equal proportions,which are larger than that of veracity within social esteem.However,negative words or phrases are more frequently used than positive ones here,which is in relation to the scenes described and emotion passed by the speakers;within the appreciation system,reflect and evaluation are of equal proportions,which are obviously higher than that of composition,while positive words or phrases are much more frequently used than negative ones,which is closely connected with the main spirit line "positiveness" of the whole commencement speech.(2)Within engagement resource,the whole commencement speech is delivered with monogloss with the first and second person instead of heterogloss.The speaker can better interact with the audience and pass on the spirit of the speech in this way.(3)Within graduation resource,force accounts for a larger proportion than focus.Within force system,quality and number account for the largest proportion while within focus system,sharp is of obvious larger proportion than soften.Despite limitations and shortcomings of the analysis of this paper,the paper tries to conduct a positive discourse analysis of Bill Gates and Melinda's 2014 Commencement Speech at Stanford,which is of crucial theoretical and practical significance,especially of important inspiring and guiding effects for those college graduates.Meanwhile,it can provide a certain reference for positive discourse analysis of commencement speeches within appraisal theory in the future.