A Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis Of Appraisal Resources In Chinese And American Commencement Addresses By Public Celebrities

As one of the genres of public speaking, commencement addresses carries wishes and expectations from speakers to graduates. In recent years, many successful people from all walks of life are invited to deliver commencement addresses so as to achieve educational revelation function. Commencement addresses has been analyzed mainly from the perspectives of anthropology,stylistics and systemic functional grammar. However, it is rare to apply Appraisal Resources to analyze commencement addresses. In the meantime, there are few comparative studies of appraisal resources in commencement addresses delivered by public celebrities.Therefore, it is of great significance to prove the applicability and guidance of appraisal resources to CCA (Chinese commencement addresses) and ACA (American commencement addresses) based on corpus.Appraisal Resources was proposed by James Martin in the 1990s, to study the appraisal resources in discourse and examine how people use it to express their attitudes in establishing and strengthening relationship with readers or audiences. It consists of three subsystems:attitude resources, engagement resources and graduation resources. In this thesis, contrastive study of appraisal resources in Chinese and American commencement addresses by public celebrities is conducted with the purpose of exploring the preference of speakers, that is to say,what kind of appraisal resources they would like to adopt to communicate with the listener so as to achieve interpersonal function of discourses. In the mean time, both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are used.In order to explore the similarities and differences between Chinese and American commencement addresses on the distribution and realization of appraisal resources, 30 Chinese and American commencement addresses are adopted. The similarities are: there are a lot of appraisal resources existing in CCA and ACA, and attitude resources, engagement resources as well as graduation resources are all employed; both Chinese speakers and American speakers are more likely to use engagement resources in which contract resources is largely employed and mainly performed by deny resources and pronounce resources; in attitude resources,both Chinese and American speakers are willing to use judgment resources while in graduation resources, the distribution of force and focus resources roughly occupy the same amount of proportion and mainly achieve interpersonal function by means of force resources. On the contrary, the difference is reflected in the following aspects: in appreciation resources of attitude resources, Chinese speakers tend to appreciate the value of things while American speakers concern more about the reaction of things or phenomena, which indicates that speakers achieve the function of education and persuasion through the description of the importance and value of things; in graduation resources, Chinese speakers are more likely to employ quantification resources while American speakers pay more attention to the use of intensification resources.This study not only broadens the research perspective of commencement addresses from the angle of linguistics, but also extends the application of appraisal resources, especially in Chinese discourse. At the same time, it can help readers understand the implied meaning of commencement addresses, thus playing a certain guiding role in teaching commencement addresses writing.