| As a new field in the Discourse Analysis, Positive Discourse Analysis gradually arouses more attention of linguistic scholars in China. Many scholars managed to analyze the political speeches because of its specificity and significance. However, in the field of the farewell addresses, the studies on this kind of political speech are limited. In the Farewell addresses, presidents needn't consider the pressure coming from the parties and people and they could conclude their policies more freely and directly. Therefore, the meaning of study on the farewell speech is not only to fill the gap of the analysis, but also to demonstrate PDA can do a good job in DA. This thesis applies the PDA under the framework of Appraisal Theory to the constructive analysis of two farewell speeches with a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Bill Clinton's and George W. Bush's farewell speeches have been chosen as the materials. Through learning the positive function and meaning of the selected farewell addresses, the author gets the conclusions as follows: Based on the qualitative analysis, the author claims that two presidents both used more positive, active vocabulary and sentences to compromise the relations with the people and let the people believe what they had said and done in the perspective of the PDA with the aid of the appraisal system. According to different distributions of appraisal resources, the author analyzes the positive meanings two presidents conveyed in their speeches, while the exact data is used to prove the author's points. Besides, the relationship between distribution of the appraisal resources and the background, which the presidents were in the office is also mentioned by the author. Compared with CDA, PDA has been proved as an effective instrument to analyze the political discourse, as it did in the case of this thesis, the Farewell addresses can be analyzed more clearly and effective, as well as positively. |
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