A Study Of The Discourse Of British Prime Minister Theresa May's Political Speech From The Perspective Of The Appraisal Theory

The Appraisal System is regarded as the further development of Systemic Functional Linguistics in the field of interpersonal function.Interpersonal meaning from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics refers to the construction of relationship between the speaker and the listener.Under the utterance spoke by the speaker,the speaker acts as an intruder to participate in the context and express his or her attitude,stances,so as to influence the audience.The Appraisal System makes further research in interpersonal meaning on the basis of discourse semantics.The Appraisal System consists of three major subsystems: attitude,engagement and graduation.The attitude system is related to people's feelings,emotions,behavioral judgement and evaluation of objects on themselves.The engagement system concerns about the sources of the attitudes and stances.The graduation system is the gradability of the attitudes.Political speech belongs to the genre of public speech.On the foundation of domestic and abroad political situation,political speech makes efforts to manifest speaker's political stances,opinions and policies,so as to persuade or influence the masses.Therefore,political speech is an important part of politics.The characteristics of political speech make it significant on the research of interpersonal meaning from the perspective of the appraisal system.The object of this research is the political speech discourse from the British Prime Minister Theresa May.The purpose of this research is to study the interpersonal meaning in the political speech discourse under the framework of the Appraisal System.Ten sample speeches are chosen from various topics to find out the distribution frequency of the appraisal resources and to analyze the political stances and intentions via the appraisal resources.The major findings are in the following:First of all,appraisal resources are abundant in the sample speeches with respect to the subsystems of attitude,engagement and graduation.Realization of the appraisal resources is through lexicogrammar in the sample speeches with plenty of nouns,adjectives,and adverbs.Secondly,among three major subsystem resources,attitudinal resources make up the largest proportion in the overall distribution frequency.Meanwhile,positive attitudinal resources far outweigh in the proportion.A wealth of positive attitudinal resources contribute to the manifestation of speaker's stances and influence on the audience.Thirdly,engagement resources account for the least proportion.The interpersonal meaning is through the invitation of the external sources and voice,which contributes to the objectivity and reliability.Finally,graduation resources rank the second place in the distribution proportion.The interpersonal meaning is achieved by frequent employment of quantification as well as intensification,which makes the audience be in the alignment with the speaker's stances.A thorough study on political speech discourse under the framework of evaluation theory has both theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,it broadens the range of the application of the Appraisal Theory and the study of political discourse;the practical significance is to play a positive role in improving speech skills.