A Comparative Study Of Appraisal Resources In Chinese And American COVID-19 Political Discourses

The appraisal system of language is an extension and development of systemic functional linguistics,which is an important means of conducting discourse analysis research and achieving interpersonal meaning.Appraisal Theory expresses interpersonal meaning at the level of discourse semantics,including attitude system,engagement system,and graduation system.Political discourse is a public discourse used by speakers in political activities to express their political stance,promote political opinions,and influence the public.Political discourses play an important role in political activities both domestically and internationally.However,due to differences in culture,values,political positions,and other aspects among different countries,the interpersonal meaning of appraisal resources in political discourses also varies at the discourse semantic level.Previous studies by scholars have mainly focused on language strategies,critical discourse analysis,and cognitive perspectives.There are few studies on political discourses using Appraisal Theory as a theoretical framework,and there are even fewer contrastive analyses of Chinese and English texts that rely on extensive corpus.This thesis adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to explore the differences in the use of appraisal resources in the corpus of political discourses made by Chinese and American leaders on the COVID-19.The thesis use Antconc and Corpus Word Parser for text segmentation statistics,and then manually mark appraisal resources.This study mainly addresses the following issues:(1)What are the distribution characteristics of appraisal resources in political discourses on COVID-19 in China and America?(2)What are the similarities and differences of appraisal resources in political discourses on COVID-19 in China and America?The results show that Chinese leaders use attitude resources most frequently for political discourses,its frequency is 46.32%.In the attitude system,Chinese leaders use affect resources and judgment resources more frequently,while American leaders use appreciation resources more frequently,which reflects that China attaches importance to unity,harmony and unity.In order to maintain the harmony of interpersonal relations and social stability in the era of COVID-19,Chinese leaders express their personal views in a positive and inclusive way rather than showing their aggressive views.In the engagement system,Chinese leaders use discourse contraction resources more frequently than American leaders to express the speakers’ positions and views,and its engagement resources accounted for 4.78%.In the graduation system,the usage frequency of force resources of American leaders is much higher than that of focus resources with a frequency of 56.58%,which can better reflect the positive and firm attitude of leaders.Due to the differences in social and cultural backgrounds between China and the West,leaders of China and America use different appraisal resources in their political discourses.Chinese leaders frequently use attitude resources to help leaders express their positions and judge political events,so as to influence the people’s original views.This is different from America,which emphasizes personal freedom of emotional discourse and advocates direct and bold expression of personal views.American leaders frequently use graduation resources to expand dialogue space,thus negotiating different views and creating a democratic atmosphere.