A Study Of Interpersonal Meanings In CEO Speeches At The Annual General Meetings From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

With the development of globalization,international communications are becoming increasingly ubiquitous.As an important communication method in international business activities,business speech possesses its unique language features and evaluative characteristics.Annual business speeches as non-improvised special speeches are of great research value.The previous researches on Appraisal Theory are mainly about political discourses.While from the same perspective,few studies on business speeches could be found;especially researches on business speeches conducted on special occasions are rarer.This paper takes Martin’s Appraisal system as the theoretical framework,and analyzes the distributions and interpersonal meanings of Appraisal resources from the three sub-systems of the Appraisal system.The purpose of this study is to explore how CEOs utilize Appraisal resources to form alliances with shareholders,employees,and consumers in the Annual General Meetings.Under the framework of Appraisal Theory,15 CEO speeches in 2017 Annual General Meetings are randomly selected by reference to Top 500.These speeches are annotated manually by UAM Corpus Tool 3.3.Finally,1142 Appraisal resources are identified,and the distributions of evaluation resources and their specific interpersonal meanings in the business speeches are revealed according to the results of data analysis.Through the qualitative and quantitative analysis,the author reaches the following conclusions:(1)There exist a large number of evaluation resources in the CEOs’ business speeches,and the positive attitude resources take up the biggest part;A few negative evaluation resources reflect that the company still could make progress even under the harsh economic environment.(2)The evaluation resources are mainly utilized in the achievements made by the company in 2016,the efforts made by employees,the trust of shareholders and customers to their company,crisis managements and expectations for the company’s future development.(3)CEOs tend to adopt contract resources;an authoritative images of the companies are established by reducing the possibility that dialogue can be negotiated.The speakers could subtly express their firm positions and convince listeners to accept their opinions.This paper studies the distributions and functions of evaluation resources in the construction of these discourses,which helps CEOs to utilize evaluation resources in their speeches to achieve better alliances with interest-related audiences.It could also shed light on business practices and business speech teaching.Meanwhile,a new perspective for the analysis of business speech discourses could be provided.