American televised presidential debates are unique political communication events, in which a candidate should set up and maintain three relationships with his hearers: the opponent, the audience, and the moderator. The present dissertation sets out to investigate the realizations of interpersonal meaning in American televised presidential debates, based on Halliday's theory of interpersonal meaning and assisted by functional theory of political campaign discourse proposed by American scholar, Benoit, W. L. The present study, taking the 2004 presidential debates between Bush and Kerry as a model, focuses on the analysis of person system, mood system and modality in these debates. The results of the analysis indicate that presidential debating language is persuasive, competitive, informative, subjective and confident. Meanwhile, this study shows that each candidate adopts different linguistic choices and strategies to maintain the relationship with the opponent, the moderator and the audience respectively. President Bush, as an incumbent, is inclined to defend himself for his past four-year presidency. Therefore, his debating style is counter-claim. However, Senator Kerry, who is a challenger in this presidential campaign, tries to destroy his opponent's presidential image and build his own by attacking President Bush and acclaiming himself;he belongs to attacking style.This study proves that the realizations of interpersonal meaning in presidential debates are diversified, and the interpersonal meaning is applicable in the research of presidential debating discourse. |