A Study Of Attitude Resources In President Xi Jinping's Political Speeches On Economy

As a public discourse,political speech is an important means for Chinese leaders to publicize and negotiate it.In political speeches,speakers and audience interact with various techniques and methods to clearly express the speakers' views on certain political issues,to help audience comprehend the abstract political information and lead the audience to accept them,so as to affect their attitudes and behaviors.As the leader of this country,president Xi Jinping has delivered plenty of political speeches that have drew the attention of many scholars.President Xi Jinping's speeches on economy not only involve international diplomacy and domestic people's livelihood,but also express his unique political views.Based on the Appraisal Theory(AT),this paper tries to analyze the realizations and distribution of attitude resources and explore the language features and social values of these speeches.Specifically,there are two research questions:1.What are the realizations of attitude resources in president Xi Jinping's political speeches on economy?2.What is the distribution of attitude resources in president Xi Jinping's political speeches on economy?The present study selects president Xi's eight speeches on economy as a corpus.By means of retrieval tools and annotative methods,this research combines quantitative and qualitative methods together,with the former figuring out the realizations and distribution of the attitude resources in these speeches and the latter exploring the influencing factors and positive meanings of these resources with reference to the semantic meanings and context analysis.This research draws the following conclusions:(1)these resources are mainly realized by explicit or implicit means such as lexical items,conceptual metaphors,special sentence structures and contextual strategies.(2)Among the three subsystems of attitude,the proportion of judgment resources and appreciation resources is relatively larger,respectively accounting for 49.44% and 35.73%,and the proportion of emotional resources is the smallest,accounting for 14.83%.The data shows that the frequency of positive appraisal resources in the corpus is much higher than that of negative resources,accounting for 92.96%,which shows president Xi's optimistic attitude and firm confidence in economic development.The analysis shows that the realizations and distribution of attitude resources in these speeches are mainly influenced by the social background and linguistic features of president Xi's speeches,which highlight the economic policy of China's mutual benefits in the new era and president Xi's peaceful strategy of diplomacy.In this study,AT provides an important basis for studying the connotation and influencing factors of president Xi Jinping's speeches on economy,and further expands the theoretical basis of discourse analysis.In view of the common foundation of AT and PDA,this paper applies AT to the Positive Discourse Analysis(PDA)of president Xi's political speeches,and provides a new perspective for the study of harmonious meaning in political discourses.