A Study Of Attitude Resources In Summer Davos Opening Speech From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

The Summer Davos Forum serves as an important window for observing new achievements,new trends,and new theories of world economic development.It mainly discusses global hot issues or trend issues and influences the development trend of the world economy.The opening speech of the Summer Davos Forum is given by the Premier of the State Council of China every year.The opening speech of the economic conference not only showed his unique political proposition,but also involved international diplomacy and domestic people’s livelihood.Appraisal theory is a new development stage of interpersonal function theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics.It shows how speakers can properly express their attitudes and opinions in the text through deepened analysis.The appraisal theory is composed of three subsystems: the attitude system,the engagement system and the graduation system.Among them,the attitude system is at the core of the appraisal theory.This thesis employs the appraisal theory as the theoretical framework,and uses the 13 opening speeches of the Prime Minister at the Summer Davos Forum from2007 to 2019 as the research object to construct a corpus.Combined the methods of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis,the author analyzes the attitude resources in the corpus with the help of data analysis software UAM Corpus Tool 3.3.Then the author summarizes the distribution,change characteristics and explores its potential reasons.The research shows that the use of positive attitude resources is much higher than that of negative attitude resources in the opening speech of the Davos Forum in the summer of 2007-2019.The addresser tends to use affect resources,followed by judgement resources,and appreciation resources are less used.The characteristics of changes in the distribution of overall attitude resources are as follows: from 2007 to2011,the distribution of attitude resources showed an upward trend.The time is in the world financial crisis,the economy is turbulent,and the spokesperson used more attitude resources especially affect resources to express China’s strong self-confidence during the crisis and establish a positive national image;from 2012 to 2013,the distribution of attitude resources remained at the overall average level.After the passage of the financial crisis,China’s economic development was relatively stable,and the frequency of use of the three attitude resources was smaller than that in the past.During this period,the spokesperson used attitude resources relatively moderately;from 2014 to 2018,the distribution of attitude resources showed a downward trend,it shows that speakers use less appraisal resources to evaluate China and the world’s economic development,but are more inclined to express facts.It has been raised again in 2019.This is because China,as the second largest economy in the world,has higher status on the world stage and a greater say.Therefore,the spokesperson uses more attitude resources to make China’s statements and express China’s point of view.The reasons for the changes in the distribution of attitude resources are as follows: First,it is related to the content of the information what the addresser wants to convey.As the addresser of the opening speech,the Chinese Premier would like to focus on the development of China and world’s economy.The second is related to the interpersonal meaning of the speech.As a speech text,the function of the opening speech is to emphasize the interpersonal meaning of the text,and the use of attitude resources greatly strengthens this textual function,making the addresser establish a good communication relationship with the audiences.Through this research,the author hopes to help people to better understand the content conveyed in the opening speech of the Summer Davos Forum in my country,and it also finds that the use of attitude resources in the speech text plays an important role in the realization of the interpersonal meaning of the text.