A Comparative Study Of Attitude Resources In Chinese And American Entrepreneurs’ Business Speech Discourses From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Entrepreneurial business speech refers to the expression of entrepreneurs’ views,attitudes,and positions on a specific type of event.It is an important way for entrepreneurs to convey their company’s philosophy and establish their corporate image.As an important means of external communication for entrepreneurs,entrepreneurial business speech has its unique linguistic characteristics and important research value.Despite the fact that appraisal theory has been applied to various types of speeches in earlier studies,few studies on entrepreneurial business speeches have been undertaken,and comparative studies are even rarer.In this thesis,based on previous studies,the author uses Martin J.R.’s Appraisal Theory as a theoretical base to analyze 30 business speeches delivered by Chinese and American entrepreneurs during 2010-2021,and the analysis is derived from three dimensions of the attitude system in appraisal theory,namely,Affect,Judgment,and Appreciation.The thesis takes the business speeches delivered by Chinese and American entrepreneurs in international economic forums,summits,product launches,etc.as the corpora,and utilizes UAM Corpus software to annotate and evaluate the attitudinal resources in the speeches to see if there are some similarities or differences in the use of attitudinal resources in the speeches of two countries.The study found that Chinese and American entrepreneurs have the following similarities and differences in the use of attitude resources in their speeches.In the whole attitude system,firstly,the total amount of attitude resources used by American entrepreneurs is significantly higher than that of Chinese;secondly,the use frequency of attitudinal resources among Chinese and American entrepreneurs from high to low is: Judgment,Appreciation,Affect,which indicates that both Chinese and American entrepreneurs are more inclined to use objective expressions in their speeches.Finally,in terms of attitude polarity,American entrepreneurs prefer to use negative attitude resources than Chinese,indicating that American entrepreneurs prefer to use critical and persuasive speech patterns and styles.More specifically,in Affect system,Chinese entrepreneurs most often use the "Un/happiness" resources,while American entrepreneurs most often use the "Dis/inclination" resources;the greatest differences were found in Judgment system,Chinese entrepreneurs prefer to use "Veracity",while American entrepreneurs prefer to use "Propriety",and negative "Social Sanction" resources are more often used in American entrepreneurs than Chinese;in Appreciation system,Chinese and American entrepreneurs perform similarly,but American entrepreneurs use appreciation resources more abundantly.This study tentatively applies appraisal theory to the comparative analysis of business speeches of Chinese and American entrepreneurs,which broadens the breadth of appraisal theory’s application in discourse research.At the same time,this study improves readers’ comprehension of business speech discourse and also provides good references for Chinese entrepreneurs on how to make better English business speeches.