A Study Of Attitudinal Resources In Political Speeches From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

As a type of political speeches,presidential debates have received extensive attention and intensive research from scholars at home and abroad,but studies from the perspective of Appraisal Theory are rare.Therefore,this thesis is intended to find out how the debaters express their attitudes successfully in 2016 American Televised Presidential Debates(ATPDs)to build their images and affect the voters’ opinions,which results in a solid alignment with the audience.Language serves as a bridge in realizing communicative goals.In Systemic Functional Linguistics,interpersonal function embodies social relations,which can be used to establish interpersonal relationship to realize communicative purposes.Appraisal theory proposed by Martin in the early 1990s,which is an extension of interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics.It deals with the linguistic resources by which speakers come to express attitudes.Appraisal theory can be divided into three interacting domains:Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.Attitude system can be sub-categorized into Affect,Judgement and Appreciation,which are related to psychological,ethical and aesthetic domains respectively.In this thesis a quantitative and qualitative analysis is given to 2016 ATPDs with the help of UAM Corpus Tool to annotate the attitudinal resources,aiming to answer the following two questions:(1)What distribution features are revealed in different attitudinal resources in the corpus of the 2016 ATPDs from Appraisal Theory?What are their motivations?(2)How do the debaters express their attitudes and opinions through various attitudinal resources?What are the features?Major findings as are follows:Firstly,attitudinal resources are widely applied in 2016 ATPDs.Judgment,Appreciation and Affect take up 41.08%,40.35%and 18.56%respectively.With Affect,experiential feelings from the audience are aroused;with Judgment,the matters according to social criteria are evaluated;debaters also insinuate their own aesthetic values to the audiences by Appreciation.The distribution features are as follows:Judgment and Appreciation resources dominate Affect;under the subcategory of Judgment,social esteem resources are widely used than social sanction;Reaction resources within Appreciation play a crucial role in expressing attitudes towards political policies.Affect resources are mainly manifested as dissatisfaction.The motivations behind the distribution features can be possibly attributed to context genre,cultural feature and the realization of interpersonal relationships.Secondly,the debaters express their attitudes through various Judgment,Appreciation and Affect resources.The linguistic realization of attitudinal resources can be summarized as follows.The realization of Judgment is through admiring and praising oneself but criticizing and condemning the opponent.The realization of Appreciation is through intimate Reaction,positive Composition and objective Valuation.The realization of Affect is through five types attitudinal meanings:happiness,unhappiness,insecurity,inclination and dissatisfaction.The features of are mainly summarized on the basis of lexical,sentential,and contextual levels:wide use of attitudinal words and first person pronouns,frequent use of declarative sentences and imperative sentences,and appropriate use of rhetoric devices.