A Study On 1993-2013 American Presidential Inaugural Address From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

The American Presidential Inaugural Address(APIA) is a type of political speech publicly delivered to American people, given by the elected American presidents on the inauguration day. APIA has a great influence, and fully reflects the basic strategies employed by the new presidents in the fields of economics, diplomacy, politics and military. The main purpose of the APIA lies in inspiring the American people, gaining their support and establishing the authority of the presidents. Therefore, APIA is gaining increasing attention among the scholars and experts in sociolinguistics. Previous studies on APIA shows that a quite number of scholars both at home and abroad try to find the shared features of APIA from the perspective of pragmatics, gene, rhetoric, style and so on. And they have been productively studied APIA from various fields. However, most of the studies are not represented from applicability, so it is of practical significance to study at APIA from the applied perspective.This thesis, taking Appraisal Theory as the theoretical framework, and taking the si x APIAes given by Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama from 1993 to 2013, as the objects of study, aims to figure out the distribution patterns of Appraisal Resources in 1993-2013 American Presidential Inaugural Addresses and the characteristics of contemporary APIA on the basis of the distribution patterns, by means of UAM Corpus Tool(version 2.8.14) for qualitative and quantitative study.By analyzing the Appraisal resources in APIA, the author finds that the Appraisal resources are rich in APIA. The positive resources account for the most. As to the Engagement resources, presidents employ more Contraction resources than the E xpansion resources, which shows that presidents are inclined to deploy the Contraction resources to establish their authority for newly elected and persuade the American people to support them. As for the Graduation resources, Force resources are usually used to amplify the utterances by presidents. Based on the distribution patterns of APIA and the detailed analysis of each pattern, three characteristics of APIA have been found and highlighted. The persuasive and agitative characteristics can be found in APIA from the perspective of language use and content. From the perspective of information of APIA, richness is also a characteristic. From the perspective of applicability, interactiveness and communicativeness are concluded as the third characteristic of APIA.