A Comparative Study Of Attitude Resources In Chinese And English Inspirational Speeches From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Appraisal Theory is an approach to the study of interpersonal meaning in language,which is used to reveal how language enables evaluation and constructs interpersonal relationships(Martin,2001).Appraisal Theory consists of three subsystems,namely attitude,engagement and graduation.Attitude system,as the core of Appraisal Theory,is the embodiment of language users’ emotions in language expression,and is used to study the dialogue and communication between speakers and listeners,which suggests that attitude resources can be used to study interpersonal communication in public speaking.Although many scholars have conducted relevant research on public speaking,there are few studies comparing Chinese and English speeches.Therefore,this paper starts from the attitude resources of Appraisal Theory,and makes a comparative analysis of the use of attitude resources in Chinese and English inspirational speeches.In this paper,the author uses two self-built small corpora to conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of 30 inspirational speeches in VOICE and TED.Firstly,the attitude words of the two discourses are manually marked and classified by UAM Corpus Tool,and then the differences in the distribution of each subsystem of attitude resources in Chinese and English inspirational speeches are compared.Finally,the reasons for the similarities and differences of attitude resources in Chinese and English inspirational speeches are analyzed.This study attempts to answer the following questions:(1)What is the proportion of attitude resources in Chinese and English inspirational speeches?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the distribution of attitude resources in Chinese and English inspirational speeches?(3)What are the reasons for the different distribution of attitude resources in Chinese and English inspirational speeches?The results of the study firstly show the similarities and differences in inspirational speeches between Chinese and English in terms of attitudes.Specifically,both Chinese and English inspirational speeches prefer positive attitude resources to negative attitude resources.Secondly,in terms of different preferences,both Chinese and English speakers tend to use more affect resources and appreciation resources rather than judgement resources in inspirational speeches.Finally,for each subsystem of attitude resources,the main difference between the two corpus is more in the distribution of judgement resources.Compared with English speeches,Chinese speeches use more social esteem and less social sanction.This study believes that the similarities and differences in the attitude resources between Chinese and English inspirational speeches are caused by the purpose of speeches,cultural factors and linguistic features.This study provides a new perspective for the appreciation and evaluation of inspirational speeches.At the same time,the insights gained from the analysis of inspirational speeches also enrich and refine Appraisal Theory.Secondly,this study also provides a reference for the writing and understanding of inspirational speeches,and gives directions in speeches appreciation,English-Chinese translation and cross-cultural communication.