Abstract
This paper presents a pilot study of attitude analysis in diplomatic discourse. The study was conducted by following the Appraisal Theory while annotating attitudinal expressions in the diplomatic speeches of the United Nations Security Council.
It is supposed that the Appraisal scheme would unfold new valuable information about the distribution of attitudes in the diplomatic discourse due to the highly specific ranking of different types of opinion representations. The aim of the study is to analyze the application of the theory to real diplomatic data.
To be fully comprehensible, these texts, though straightforward on the surface, require additional attention from the reader. The data consist of 20 speeches that were sampled from the UN Security Council Debates dataset and then manually annotated by applying the "attitude" part of the Appraisal theory scheme.
The annotation process has shown problematic points regarding the influence of polarity of the actors on expressing attitudes, attitudes impli