The Interpersonal Meaning Of Engagement Resources In US Televised Presidential Debates

In recent years, televised presidential debates play a more important role in American presidential campaign. In the debate, the final purpose of the candidate is to persuade more electorate to vote for him and win the election eventually. The candidate's ability to speak effectively in public and his ability to maintain the favorable interpersonal relationships in the debate are both powerful weapons in the fighting for presidency. The candidate makes full use of the debating language to manipulate the complicated interpersonal relationships in the debates and strive for being entrusted with the presidency. Therefore, in the unique political discourse of US televised presidential debates, both the debating language and the complicated interpersonal relationships deserve our attention.The interpersonal meaning of language has aroused many linguists' interest and been interpreted from different linguistic angles. Halliday's research on interpersonal function in systemic functional grammar has been very influential, however it still needs improvement. Developed out of systemic functional grammar linguistics, the Appraisal Theory, concerns evaluative meaning by researching into interpersonal meaning across kinds of discourses (e.g. Martin & Rose, 2003; Martin & White, 2005). The Appraisal Theory highlights discourse analysis from the perspective of discoursesemantics in terms of three broad domains--ATTITUDE, ENGAGEMENT andGRADUATION, which are closely related to each other and all contribute to the realization of interpersonal meaning. Due to the limited space, the thesis will only focus on the engagement resources of the appraisal system.The modified theoretical framework for the present research is reconstructed by combining the engagement system with the functional theory of presidential campaign discourse proposed by Benoit. Under the modified theoretical framework, the present study tries to explore how the various engagement resources are employed to realize the interpersonal meaning in US televised presidential debates. To get a thorough and objective analysis, both qualitative and quantitative analytical methods are adopted in this study.The study shows that interpersonal meanings can be realized by various engagement resources in the US televised presidential debates. Both the contraction resources and the expansion resources are used as effective devices of establishing and maintaining the interpersonal relationship in the debate, however, the contraction resources are employed more often than the expansion resources. The uneven distribution of the engagement resources is compatible with the features of US televised presidential debate and the function of the engagement resources in realizing the interpersonal meaning.