An Analysis Of Jack Ma’s English Speech From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Jack Ma, the executive Chairman of Alibaba Group, has delivered quite a lot of speeches around the world, which bring strong shocks to the business world. Having been invited, Jack Ma gave an English speech on June 10, 2015 in the Economic Club of New York, which is an important public forum for its principle members, such as senior business, finance and relevant industries’ leaders.Based on Martin’s Appraisal Theory, selecting Jack Ma’s speech in the Economic Club of New York as data, this thesis intends to explore how the speaker(Jack Ma) realizes the interpersonal meaning in the speech. It aims to reveal how the speaker uses linguistic resources in a speech to coordinate Affect, Judgment and Appreciation, and deals with its semantic content in Graduation and Engagement.James R. Martin developed Appraisal Theory in 1990 s from the interpersonal function under the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics by Halliday. As one part of the interpersonal function, it analyzes the interpersonal meaning from the semantic level. Compared with Halliday’s meta-functions, Appraisal Theory focuses more on exploring the way people use Appraisal resources to realize the interpersonal meaning. Usually, the Appraisal Theory is applied in discourse analysis, translation studies, etc. In recent years, quite a few scholars have studied English public speech from the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar, while interpreting public speech with Appraisal Theory is seldom; and research with the Appraisal Theory to analyze Jack Ma’s English speech is rare.In the study, the thesis finds that Affect, Judgment and Appreciation involved in Jack Ma’s speech are mostly positive, with which Jack Ma tends to express his joy, pride and confidence. And with the positive Attitude, he displays his firm belief and views, gives the audiences confidence and stimulates their spirit and determination to face the challenges. By analyzing the Engagement system, the thesis finds that the Dialogic Contraction accounts for a higher percentage than the Dialogic Expansion, which shows Alibaba’s determination and ability to face difficulties. In Graduation system, Jack Ma utilizes Force and Focus to achieve the Graduation of Appraisal meaning. Besides, Jack Ma employs a large amount of numbers to show the company’s goal and performance, which reflects the objectivity and concreteness of the wording in the speech.The thesis is in an attempt to shed some light on people, who write or listen to such speeches with the analysis of distribution of the Appraisal resources in Jack Ma’s speech from the perspective of Appraisal Theory.