| With the further deepening of economic globalization,international business exchanges become increasingly frequent.Enterprises would seize every opportunity tight to promote themselves and their products,to improve their corporate image and shorten the distance with consumers.For enterprises,Product Launch Conference is the most important and effective way to coordinate the relationship with customers.PLC is of great strategic significance for enterprises to contact customers and promote the newly developed products.As the leader of an enterprise,CEO usually delivers non-impromptu speeches at PLC.As an extremely important way of publicity and communication,this kind of business speech has its own unique language characteristics and research value.But this kind of business speech has not received enough attention and few scholars have analyzed it from the perspective of linguistics.Also,few scholars apply appraisal theory to study business speeches on such special occasions.This paper aims to apply Martin’s appraisal theory to analyze CEOs’ speeches at PLC.From the perspective of three subsystems of appraisal system,this paper will find out the appraisal resources distribution characteristics and its interpersonal meaning realizations,namely to analyze how CEO expresses their own opinions,how to use the evaluation resources to connect with potential customers,promote their new products.With the help of annotation software UAM Corpus Tool,15 CEOs’ speeches are annotated.There are 1,442 pieces of appraisal resources that are obtained and the specific distribution characteristics of appraisal resources in such business speeches are found.After both the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the discourses,findings are as follows:(1)Appraisal resources are widely applied in such business speeches,among which attitude resources account for the largest proportion while engagement resources the smallest;(2)In the attitude system,speakers have a preference for the appreciation resources,especially valuation resources,and the capacity resources in the judgment system.In addition,almost all of the attitude resources are positive.(3)In the engagement system,CEOs tend to use dialogic contraction resources over dialogic expansion resources to close down the space for different stances,then to establish an authoritative image and persuade the audience;(4)In the graduation system,force resources are more favored than focus resources.Among force resources,CEOs tend to utilize intensification resources over quantification resources.Through the research,this paper obtains the appraisal resources distribution characteristics and their interpersonal meaning delivered in such business speeches,hoping to provide a reference for appraisal resources application in CEOs’ speeches on such an occasion. |
