A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And American Presidents’ New Year Speeches Based On Appraisal Theory

Since Martin’s publication of his work Beyond Exchange:Appraisal Systems in English, the Appraisal theory has gained much attention from both home and abroad and has been developed and improved continuously. It is a new development under the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics concerning the interpersonal meaning. It is concerned with linguistic resources which use language to convey attitude and stance. It comprises three major systems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation.It has become common practice for state leaders to deliver New Year speeches to communicate messages related to the country’s present state, show their attitude and consolidate their relationship with the public. State leaders’New Year speeches become increasingly important and get more and more attention. The present thesis attempts to use the linguistics software UAM CorpusTool to analyze from the perspective of Appraisal theory18New Year speeches delivered respectively by Chinese president and American president from2004to2012to probe into the features of the speeches, their similarities and differences in terms of the use of Appraisal resources and the way the interpersonal meaning is realized by these resources.Contrastive study of the thesis has drawn the following conclusions:First, a larger proportion of attitudinal resources are used in American president’s speeches though both presidents use them. Within the Attitude system, Affect resources are preferably used in American president’s speeches while Appreciation resources are preferred to in Chinese president’s speeches. Second, the difference is not significant in their overall use of Engagement resources. But within the system, Judgment resources are mostly Social Sanction in American president’s speeches and are Social Esteem in Chinese president’s speeches. Third, Graduation resources used in Chinese president’s speeches outnumber those used in American president’s speeches.The present research may shed some new light on discourse analysis and extend the scope of the application of Appraisal theory by applying it to the study of New Year speeches which may help people get a better understanding of both the Appraisal theory and New Year speeches. Due to some intrinsic subjective factor of the theory and the limited knowledge of the author, the research needs to be further developed and improved in the future.