Analysis Of Political Speeches During Crisis Situations With Appraisal Theory

Appraisal theory, which extends Halliday's model of the realizations of interpersonal meaning and offers systemic models to study the language of evaluation, consists of three basic systems: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement. It gives preference to evaluation achieved through lexis rather than clause rank grammar and distinguishes explicit attitudes from attitudinal tokens whose values are triggered by ideational meanings.Within the theoretical model of Appraisal theory, two presidential crisis speeches presented by the Bushes are analyzed as a case study aiming to find out appraisal resources that establish certain ideological position in the political speeches and to probe into the ways that develop and naturalize this particular ideological position. Two crisis speeches of the same topic-war declarations against Iraq delivered respectively by George Bush in 1991 and George W. Bush in 2003 are chosen as the demonstrations because on one hand crisis situations, such as foreign crises, offer the best opportunity for the presidents to identify with the audience the reality they construe in the speeches and on the other hand because of the variety of the audience/readers and their various social cultural backgrounds, the speakers need to negotiate their ideological position with them. Therefore, crisis speeches can be a rich repertoire of the appraisal resources. It is found that the distinction between "us (good)" and "them (evil)" is established as a seemingly simple reality through the distribution of positive and negative attitudinal vocabulary and it is developed and naturalized by 1) the careful arrangement of inscribed attitudes and invoked attitudinal tokens; 2) the so-called heteroglossia.The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 serves as the introduction of the content, the significance and the theoretical foundation of the thesis. Chapter 2 reviews the initiative, framework, applications and natures of Appraisal Theory. Chapter 3 briefly reviews political speeches and political speeches delivered during crisis situations. Chapter 4 is the descriptive analysis of two crisis speeches deliveredrespectively by US President Bushes and summarizes the findings. Chapter 5 concludes the main points of the whole thesis and briefly discusses the limitations of the present thesis and the implications of Appraisal theory.