Acontrastive Study On Appraisal Resources In Chineseand English Political Speeches From The Perspectiveof Appraisal Theory

Appraisal theory is an extension and development of Systemic Functional Linguistics.Appraisal theory is also an important means of realizing interpersonal meaning in the discourse analysis.Interpersonal meaning is expressed by speakers with appraisal theory at the level of textual semantics,including attitude system,engagement system and graduation system.Political speeches are a public speech used by speakers to express political positions,propagate political opinions so as to influence the public in political activities.Political speeches are very important in political activities at home and abroad.However,due to the differences in culture,values as well as the political positions in different countries,the interpersonal meanings of political speech are naturally different at the level of textual semantics.The previous relative researches mainly focus on the perspectives of language strategy,critical discourse analysis and cognition analysis.Only a few are concerned based on the theoretical framework of appraisal theory.In addition,less comparative analysis between Chinese and English political speeches with extensive corpus are involved.A combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods is adopted in this study.The Chinese and English political speeches of national leaders are selected as the corpus.And the appraisal theory is used as the theory framework to explore the differences in the use of appraisal resources between the Chinese and English political speeches.The following issues are addressed in this study:1.What are the differences in the use of appraisal resources between Chinese and English political speeches?2.What are the causes that result in the differences in the use between English and Chinese political speeches?It is shown that among the three subsystems of appraisal theory,the frequency of attitude resources is the highest for both Chinese and English political speeches.In the attitude system,more affect resources are used in Chinese political speeches,while more judgement resources are used in English political speeches.In the engagement system,more dialogic contraction resources are used in English political speeches than Chinese political speeches to clearly express the speaker's position and viewpoint.In the graduation system,the frequency of force resources for both Chinese and English political speeches is much higher than the frequency of focus resources reflecting the positive and firm attitude of leaders.The main reasons for the difference are as follows:Because of the different socio-cultural backgrounds between China and the West in the use of the two languages,different appraisal strategies and resources are adopted for both Chinese and English political speeches to achieve interpersonal and evaluation meanings.First of all,there is a collectivist culture in China so Chinese leaders focus on the harmony and unity of the collective.In order to maintain the harmony of interpersonal relationships,Chinese leaders also prefer to use indirect,euphemistic as well as more subtle ways to express personal opinions,rather than to show off.On the contrary,there is a individualistic culture in America which is helpful in emphasizing the individual emotional freedom in speeches and advocating direct and bold personal opinions.Secondly,Chinese is regarded as a parataxis and tone language so Chinese leaders prefer to use repetitive and parallel structures.While English is a hypotaxis language so English leaders pay attention to the changes in language forms and avoid repetition.Among them,a higher frequency use of attitude resources is used to help leaders express their positions or judgments on political events so as to influence the views of the audience;the higher frequency use of dialogic expansion resources are used to expand the dialogue space and negotiate different views to creat the atmosphere of democracy;the higher frequency use of graduation resources are used to adjust the semantic strength and persuade more listeners.It is also helpful in naturalizing the leader's position and reflecting the leader's positive and firm attitude.