A Comparative Study On Interpersonal Meaning In Trump And Hillary’s Televised Presidential Debates From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

U.S.televised presidential debates are mainly targeted at the undecided voters and those who tend not to be partial to any political ideology or party.In consequence,U.S.televised presidential debates have some potential to change the voting intention of the voters.The competitive relationship between the candidates and the persuasive relationship between the candidates and the audience exist throughout the debates.Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Linguistics has been widely applied to the study of interpersonal meaning of language.Yet,it makes no reference to the semantics of evaluation.Based on Systemic-Functional Linguistics,Appraisal Theory makes a further study on interpersonal meaning and provides an effective approach to describe and explain the way language is used to evaluate,to adopt stances,to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positionings and relationships.Under the framework of Appraisal Theory,this thesis attempts to make a comparative analysis on how Trump and Hillary adopt Appraisal resources to negotiate the interpersonal meaning in 2016 U.S.televised presidential debates to serve their purpose of winning the debates.In this study,both quantitative and qualitative analyses were made.Each candidate’s Appraisal resources in the three debates were categorized based on the three sub-systems of Appraisal Theory.Then,the frequencies and proportions of each category of Appraisal resources were calculated with the help of UAM Corpus Tool,a computerized text annotation system.How Appraisal resources are employed to negotiate the interpersonal meaning and the similarities and differences between the candidates’ use of Appraisal resources are explored.The major findings are concluded as follows.1)Attitude,Engagement,and Graduation are intertwined with each other and work together to negotiate the candidates’ competition with the opponents and persuasion with the audience.2)By Attitude resources,candidates invite the audience to empathize with them in terms of emotions,ethics and morality,aesthetics and social values and establish solidarity with them.3)Dialogic Contraction is more favored by both candidates to restrict the alternatives and convey their firm political stances.Dialogic Expansion is used to negotiate the alternatives and avoid subjectivity in argumentation.4)By Graduation,both candidates grade their propositions and attitudes.The large use of Raise resourcesreinforces the attitudinal meaning and makes argumentation convincing.5)Trump is more “power-oriented”,while Hillary is relatively “solidarity-oriented” when managing interpersonal meaning.This thesis helps us to have a deep understanding of political discourse and Trump’s and Hillary’s language styles.Learning evaluative language also helps us to convey proper stances and positions,and make effective communications.