评价理论是系统功能语言学的人际意义系统的新发展,它关注语篇中可以协商的各种态度。从情感、判定和鉴赏三个维度考察奥巴马在政治演说中对家庭观念的构建,发现在涉及家庭观念的语料中奥巴马更多地使用了积极的态度来传达自己对家庭及美国大众家庭的关爱;奥巴马在构建家庭观时主要使用了有关情感态度的词语,较少使用评价和鉴赏的词语。主要原因是奥巴马希望通过情感表达来引起民众的情绪共鸣,从而达到让听众赞同其政治观点的目的。
Appraisal theory is the latest development of the interpersonal meaning system of Systemic Functional Grammar. It focuses on all the attitudes which are negotiable in the discourse (Li Zhanzi, 2002). In the present study, the authors applied the Appraisal Theory to analyze Obama's attitudinal meaning toward the concept of family in his political speeches through the three dimensions: affect, judgment and appreciation. Appraisal analysis reveals that when mentioning the concept of family, Obama intends to use more positive attitudes to express his care to his own family and also to the ordinary families. Secondly, the uses of Affect linguistic resources are overwhelmingly more than that of the Judgment and Appreciation. The major factor causing this is that Obama intends to evoke sympathetic responses from the public by expressing more affect attitudes.