A Study On The Interpersonal Meaning Of Modality System In Obama And Romney’s Televised Presidential Debates-from The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

As a special and typical kind of political discourses, American televised presidentialdebates have attracted more and more scholars. How to deal with the complex interpersonalrelationships and fully manipulate the interpersonal functions in the debates by applyinglanguage strategies are significant for the candidates to get support from the electorates andwin the presidential race ultimately. Obama and Romney’s three televised presidential debatesin2012are selected as the research corpus of this study. The study takes the modality systemin the three debates as the research object, and analyzes the interpersonal meaning of themodality system from the perspective of Appraisal Theory by applying both quantitative andqualitative methods.Martin’s Appraisal Theory, which studies the appraisable lexical resources from theangles of attitude, engagement and graduation, can be regarded as the new development ofHalliday’s Theory of Interpersonal Metafunction. Halliday has made great contributions onthe classification of the modality system. So far, almost all of the researches on theinterpersonal meaning of modality have been conducted from the perspective of Halliday’sinterpersonal metafunction. However, modality expressions reflecting addresser’s attitudestowards or comments on certain events, are certainly endowed with evaluative significance.This study analyzes the interpersonal functions and evaluative meaning of various types,orientations and values of modality from the perspective of Appraisal Theory.The research findings are as follows. Firstly, from the perspective of the using frequencyof each type, orientation and value of the modality system, the distinction of the distributionsof the modality system in Obama and Romney’s presentations in the three debates is ratherweak. In both of the two candidates’ presentations, modality expressions related to possibilityare applied most frequently, while that are related to usuality are used least; with regard to theorientations of modality, the number of modality metaphors is markedly fewer than that ofthose not metaphorical; as regards different values of modality, the low-value modalityexpressions are used most frequently, while the high-value modality are least applied by the candidates. In this way, the candidates try to make the speech less subjective and controversial,more acceptable and persuasive. Secondly, in theory, there are connections between appraisalsystem and modality system; in practice, modality expressions are endowed with evaluativemeaning, so as to establish interpersonal relationships and convey the addressers’ attitudes,opinions and standpoints. Various types, orientations and values of modality can be used bycandidates to make judgments on social esteem or social sanction, to give rise to dialogicexpansion or contraction, and to indicate different intensities of judgments or differentdegrees of engagement, which thus can be analyzed from the perspectives of judgment,heterogloss and force. Thirdly, as the defender of the presidency, Obama tends to utilize moreaffirmative modality expressions to make positive judgments on his policies, personality,leadership ability and ideals, so that his qualification as an office-holder can be enhanced.While Romney, as a challenger to the presidency, tends to employ more negative modalityexpressions to attack or reduce the previous president’s qualifications and image as anoffice-holder, which is beneficial for him to obtain the audience’s support from the side.The research can be regarded as a significant effort on the application of the AppraisalTheory in the analysis of the interpersonal meaning of modality system, which provides a newsight for the studies of modality, and is beneficial for improving people’s appreciation andcomprehension towards political and debating discourses.