Analysis Of English Version Of Hu Jintao’s Report At The Eighteenth Party Congress From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

The National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is a conference held every five years, and is of great importance to China’s social development. During the Eighteenth National Congress of the CPC which was convened in November2012, the former General Secretary of CPC Hu Jintao delivered a political report, which concluded the achievement China had made in the previous five years and lessons learnt from2002to2012and lay out some guiding principles for China’s future development in the construction of socialism with Chinese characters. In recent years, there is a plenty of research made in the field of political report, but most of them focus on political speech, and it is a rare occurrence to employ Appraisal Theory to the analysis of political report. That’s why this thesis chooses Hu’s report as the research corpus and apply Appraisal Theory to analylise appraisal resources in the report for the fact thatAppraisal Theory, put forward by Martin in the1990s, is an extension of interpersonal function in the area of systematic functional grammar developed by Halliday. It is composed of three sub-systems:attitude, graduation and engagement, among which attitude plays a central part in the whole system. To ensure efficiency of the research, this paper adopts both quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study. The quantitative study mainly uses UAM corpus tool to discover the distribution and frequency of appraisal resources and the qualitative method is to employ Appraisal Theory to find out how the former president Hu make suse of appraisal resources to express his attitude, stance and viewpoint for the purpose of maximal alignment and solidarity with the audience.The research has proved that there is plenty of appraisal resources in this political report but there is a difference in terms of its frequency. Data analysis indicates that of the whole attitudinal resources, judgment takes a primary position with appreciation coming the second and affect the third. Besides, the positive attitudinal resources far outweigh that of the negative. The positive attitudinal resources are mainly employed to praise the effort made by the Chinese people and the Communist Party in the process of building socialism and what China has achieved in the social progress, while the negative are used to condemn some adverse phenomenon in China’s social development. In the graduation system, the frequency of force is much higher than focus and upscaled force far outnumbers that of the downscaled. Furthermore, there is a plenty of superlative and comparative degree, which indicates Hu tends to use upscaled force to inform the audience of the great changes taken place in the past five years and also express his expectation of the Chinese people. In this way he also makes clear his attitude, strengthening the persuasive power of the political report. In the Engagement system, the monoglossic resources are much more frequently used than the heteroglossic resources, which indicates that Hu intends to use his authority to make alliance with audience. In the category of heterogloss, the frequency of dialogic expansion is much higher than dialogic contraction, and all the dialogic expansion are realized by entertain resources, which means Hu is more inclined to negotiate with the audience to maximally unite the people from all walks of life.It is expected that after a comprehensive analysis of the data under the Appraisal System, the research could prove conductive to those who are in the political circles or who are concerned with political dynamics, and also be helpful to those who teach politics or write political papers.