A Contrastive Study Of Appraisal Resources In Chinese And English Political Speeches In Light Of Appraisal Theory

The appraisal system of languages expresses speakers’ feelings or stances and constructs specific interpersonal and social relations.It is composed of three sub-systems: attitude,engagement and graduation.Attitude is the core of appraisal system,focusing on people’s feelings,the judgment of behaviors and the appreciation of objects.Engagement modulates speakers’ responsibility and obligation towards what is said.Graduation is to grade all appraisal resources,regulating attitudes and the degree of engagement.In political speeches,speakers demonstrate their stances of domestic and foreign political affairs and publicize political opinions.The ultimate aims are to resonate with the audience mentally and emotionally and convince them to take actions.Speakers employ evaluative resources to encode their judgment on speech information so as to achieve their political purposes.Up to now,the discourse analysis of political speeches has been extensively explored from the perspective of critical discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics.However,there are fewer studies under the framework of appraisal theory,let alone contrastive analysis of Chinese and English political speeches with sufficient discourse materials.Thus,this study endeavors to make contributions to promoting studies in this field.Taking fifteen Chinese and fifteen English political speeches of top national leaders as corpora,the study is conducted by qualitative and quantitative methods.It calculates appraisal resources in the corpora respectively,and classifies them accurately in accordance with appraisal theory,and counts up the frequency of each category to make a contrastive analysis of them.The study mainly surveys what appraisal resources are used,and how each appraisal type contributes to expressing evaluative meaning and realizing interpersonal meaning,and the similarities and distinctions in the usage frequency of each appraisal type in Chinese and English political speeches.Besides,the linguistic and sociocultural rationales underlying the differences are also elaborated.This study provides a novel approach to the investigation of political speeches which helps to have a more comprehensive and profound understanding of them.Furthermore,it is hoped that the study will provide a beneficial implication for the writing and interpretation of political speeches.It is concluded from the study that appraisal resources are abundant in Chinese and English political speeches.These resources facilitate to express stances,establish a friendly interpersonal relation with listeners and realize political objectives.There exist commonalities and differences in the usage frequency of each appraisal type.Attitude resources take up a dominating place because they help express standpoints and judgment of political affairs and exert influence on the audience’s original viewpoints.Among attitude resources,appreciation and judgment resources are applied more frequently to convey judgment of the nation,the public and the achievements of the government.Graduation resources rank the second.They are conducive to aligning more audience through the modulation of semantic force.Nearly all the graduation resources are raising force resources,which contribute to naturalizing leaders’ stances and expressing their positive and firm attitudes.Engagement resources are least,and dialogic expansion resources outnumber contraction ones in that the former is helpful to negotiate alternative standpoints and create a democratic atmosphere by way of broadening dialogic space.The remarkable differences lie in the sub-systems of attitude.As for affect and appreciation resources,Chinese leaders prefer to employ happiness and composition resources because China devotes itself to improving the people’s happiness and achieving common prosperity.While western leaders adopt more appreciation resources to demonstrate the achievement of the government.When it comes to judgment resources,Chinese leaders tend to use social sanction resources.The reason is that Chinese core values are deeply embedded in Confucianism whose social ethics are based on social conventions and morality as a way of regulating people’s behavior.Besides,Chinese leaders employ the repetition and parallel structures of appraisal resources to strengthen the degree of judgment.Chinese is a parataxis and tone language which facilitates to use repetition and parallel structures,while English is a hypotaxis language which focuses on the change of linguistic forms and tends to avoid repetition.In brief,both the distinction in certain sociocultural aspects and Chinese and English languages contribute to the different adoption of appraisal strategies and resources to realize interpersonal meaning.