A Comparison On Appraisal Resources In Public Speeches By Native And Nonnative Speakers Of English

In this thesis, a tentative analysis of the attitudinal resources in the English public speeches delivered by native and nonnative speakers is made in the framework of appraisal theory. Appraisal theory, first proposed by J.R.Martin and his colleagues in 1990s, extends Halliday's model of the realization of interpersonal meaning and offers systemic models to study the language of evaluation. The theory is concerned more particularly with the language of evaluation, attitude and emotion, and propositions interpersonally. Appraisal theory is then classified into three semantic domains: attitude, engagement and graduation.As one kind of appraisal resources, attitude plays an important role in the expression of the interpersonal meaning of language. It is the resource concerned with feelings, including emotional reactions, judgments of behavior and evaluation of things. It can be further divided into three sub-systems: Affect, judgment and appreciation. Appraisal theory gives preference to evaluation realized through lexis rather than clause or grammar and it distinguishes explicit attitudes from implicit attitudes, and provides an effective means for people to study the attitudinal meaning expressed in discourse.Public speech is a skilled social communication by which people can realize specific purposes such as giving information, creating entertainment and persuading. With the development of the globalization, English public speech is more widely practiced. Creating public speech has become an indispensible course in the college education. It is research focus how to create a standard English public speech.This research analyzes 20 English public speeches delivered by Chinese and British, in the hope of holding the Olympic Games. Among them, 10 speeches are made by famous Chinese and the others made by notable British. This thesis aims to analyze the attitudinal resources in the English public speeches delivered by native and nonnative speakers of English, using the appraisal theory with a view to reveal the distribution features of attitudinal resources in the two types of English public speeches and try to find out the how the speakers utilize the attitudinal resources to realize the attitudinal meaning in their public speeches. The analysis of the attitudinal resources in the two groups of the public speaking leads to the conclusion in the following part.There are some similar common features on the distribution of the attitudinal resources in the two public speeches: 1) all of the speakers prefer to express their attitudes, standpoints and opinions through the attitudinal resources and the attitudinal resources take a large proportion in the resources used to express the attitudinal meaning; 2) the two lean to express their attitudes explicitly and seldom use the implicit resources to develop their ideas; 3) in the affect system, both of them rely mainly on social esteem; 4)in the affect system, the most evaluation in the speeches belong to the process and comment.At the same time, there are some differences between the two groups of the public speeches: 1) in the attitude system, the nonnative speakers like to indicate their opinions through all of the three subsystems, while the native speakers lean to develop their ideas mainly through affect system and judgment system; 2) the nonnative speakers realize judgment meaning by attitudinal verbs, adjectives as attributive and epithets and adverbials while the native speakers mainly use attitudinal nouns and attitudinal verbs; 3) the native speakers express themselves through more negative judgment words than the nonnative speakers; 4) the native speakers seldom use appreciation resources in their speeches, but the nonnative speakers use a lot of appreciation resources, most of which belong to the reaction and social value; 5) in the speeches by nonnative speakers, most attitudinal resources that combine with the engagement resources belong to judgment resources, while the English native speakers mainly combine the affect resources with the engagement resources.