从评价理论角度对比分析总统竞选演讲词——以奥巴马和麦凯恩竞选演讲为例外国语言学与应用语言学专业论文.docxVIP

Abstract Political speeches are delivered by speakers to announce their positions, opinions, and policies about the political situation. They play an important role in western political life, thus becoming a fascinating topic for scholars. As one kind of political speeches, presidential election speeches deserve our attention, from which audience could get to know speakers’ stance, attitude, and even their personal characteristics. The Appraisal Theory is an extension of interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics and it is also a newly developed theoretical framework which mainly aims at evaluating resources in texts. In the linguistic domain, the Appraisal Theory is composed of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. The specialty of the theory lies in that it tends to analyze evaluative language from the aspect of lexis instead of grammar. This thesis analyzes the chosen texts in terms of lexis in detail. The texts analyzed in this thesis are speeches by the 56th presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, and they are analyzed from the perspectives of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation, after which the thesis comes to the conclusion that the two speakers both expressed rich Attitude to the audience, but Obama expressed relatively more. With the Engagement resources concerned, the distribution of Expansion resources in both of the speeches is higher than the Contraction resources. However, when contrasting the two speeches, it is found that Obama is more likely to show power and solidarity with the audience, while McCain is more likely to negotiate with the audience. In terms of Graduation, McCain used more Force resources to amplify his voice by adding force in language. Keywords Appraisal Theory; presidential election speeches; Obama; McCain; contrastive analysis Contents Chinese abstract I English abstract II HYPERLINK \l _TOC_250039 Chapter1 Introduction 1 HYPERLINK \l _TOC_250038 General statement 1 HYPERLINK \l