Research On Attitude Resources In British Queen's Christmas Speeches From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Since the Australian linguist Martin released Woking with Discourse: Meaning Beyond the Clause,appraisal theory has drawn wide attention from domestic and foreign experts and scholars.This theory expands and extends the interpersonal metafunction of Halliday's system functional grammar.There are three subsystems under the appraisal theory: the attitude system,the engagement system and the graduation system,and each system has its own subsystem.In the field of discourse analysis,appraisal theory has been widely used in a number of corpora such as news discourses,courtroom discourses,academic book reviews,movie criticisms,literary texts,online shopping reviews,talk show discourses,and university graduation speeches,etc.Many experts and scholars have conducted discourse analysis of public speech discourse,most of them are the analysis of political speeches,especially the analysis of the speeches of the U.S.presidential speaker,while the discourse analysis of cultural discourses are seldom analyzed.Through Christmas speeches,Queen reviewed the major events that occurred in the United Kingdom and the world in that year and consolidated the close relations with the Commonwealth of Independent States.At the same time,she inspired and enriched people's spiritual world,spread Christianity cultural thought and maintained a good royal image.Based on the attitude system,this thesis took a qualitative and quantitative approach to study the Christmas speeches of Queen Elizabeth II from 1952 to 2016,using data and charts to find out the distribution of attitude resources and discussing the relationship between language and ideology relationship,reveals how the Queenusing attitude resources to express ideas and values,to achieve interpersonal significance of speech discourses.In order to make the research more scientific,this study uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods.First,the UAM Corpus Tool(Version3.0)was used to mark and categorize the attitude resources of the Queen's 64 Christmas speeches published from 1952 to 2016.Then,using the statistics of UAM Corpus Tool,descriptive data about the three subsystems of attitude,judgment and appreciation were obtained.Finally,qualitative analysis was done about the features and functions in the attitude resources used in the Queen's Christmas speeches.The findings of the study demonstrate that among the three subsystems of attitude,affect is most frequently employed while judgement is the least frequently used,with judgement standing in the middle.As for the loading feature of all the attitude resources,81% of the attitude resources employed in the speeches are positive while only 19% are negative.In addition,through conceptual metaphors used in attitude resources,the Queen expects to inspire her people to work together to overcome difficulties and build the British Commonwealth into a strong and stable extended family.These attitude resources are mainly used to arouse the public's sympathy and increase each other's confidence and courage in the future.At the same time,Queen maintains and enhances the dignity of the royal family and stabilizes public sentiment.