Introduction
Appraisal system is also called appraisal theory, which not only pays close attention to the speaker’s attitude indicating that some person, thing, situation, action, event or state of affairs is to be viewed either positively or negatively, but also involves the expression and coordination of the speaker’s attitude and stance. Ever since the theory comes out, it has been widely used in literary, academic and media textual analysis. It provides readers with a better understanding of the author’s attitude, perspective and stance. It is made up of three sub-systems: attitude, graduation and engagement.
This study will mainly explore the attitudinal meanings, and little attention will be paid to graduation and engagement. And attitude is presented in three semantic aspects---affect, judgment and appreciation. Political speeches, a common tool for the politicians in the US, are informative. And the speech maker is always trying to win the support of the public. Political speeches are also concerned with something that has happened in the past, what the government is going to do and what kind of policy will be implemented in the near future. This paper attempts to analyze the attitudinal meaning and its distribution of President Bush’s weekly radio addresses. The paper will first present development and framework of appraisal theory, then will collect and analyze the data, six pieces of President Bush’s weekly radio addresses which are randomly selected, and finally adopt the attitude method to analyze the interpersonal meanings of those addresses.
Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Literature Review 2
2.1 Appraisal Theory Studies Abroad 2
2.2 Appraisal Theory Research in China 2
2.3 Studies on Attitude 3
3. Appraisal Framework 5
3.1 Attitude 5
3.1.1Affect 6
3.1.2 Judgment 7
3.1.3 Appreciation 7
3.2 Graduation 8
3.3 Engagement 9
4. Data Collection and Results 10
4.1 Data Collection 10
4.2 Research Results 10
5. Data analysis of Attitude in Bush’s weekly Radio Addresses 13
5.1 Analysis of Affect 13
5.2 Analysis of judgment 15
5.3 Analysis of appreciation 17
6. Major Findings 20
Acknowledgements 21
References 22
