Positive Discourse Analysis Of Entrepreneurs’ Speeches From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Entrepreneurs’ speeches are the tool for successful entrepreneurs to convey their ideology and positive thoughts to common people.Different from other types of speech,entrepreneurs’ speeches encourage and support the young men.At the same time,their speeches become the spiritual treasure among the youth from all over the world,and spur them to march ahead courageously.This thesis analyzes five speeches given by entrepreneurs,such as Jobs,Bill Gates,Jeff Bezos,Eric Schmidt and Jack Ma from the perspective of positive discourse analysis in the frame of appraisal theory to reveal the content and the construction of entrepreneurs’ speeches.Appraisal theory is a kind of linguistic appraisal system,containing attitude,engagement and graduation resources.This thesis aims at exploring the positive discourse meaning in these five entrepreneurs’ speeches.By analyzing,this research has gained the following results.In these five entrepreneurs’ speeches,attitudinal resources(47.02%)are most used,which is followed by the engagement resources(28.66%)and graduation resources(24.32%).Positive meaning words far outnumber the negative meaning words among these three resources.In attitudinal resources,entrepreneurs employ attitude words to stimulate the audience by evaluating his or her own characteristics,the social reality,employment situation and their expectation for the young men.In engagement resources,entrepreneurs stress on using heterogloss resources to revel their views.Projection,modality,concession,dialogue contraction and dialogue expansion are used to interact with their audience.In graduation resources,entrepreneurs are good at using force resources.Some attitudinal words can also be classified as force words,which enrich the range of the force resources.By summarizing all the resources,it can be concluded that positive vocabularies are used to convey positive message to the young men.Entrepreneurs want to construct a good relationship between their audience through positively transmitting their idea and spirit.The analysis ofentrepreneurs’ speeches enriches the study field of appraisal theory.Meanwhile,it plays a practical role in guiding and helping young men to build up a positive life attitude.