Interpersonal Meaning Construction Of Political Discourse In Light Of Appraisal Theory And Multimodal Interaction Theory

In recent decades, many linguists have deemed the political speech as a special kind of discourse and carried out research of political speeches from various angles by using different linguistic methods, meanwhile, a lot of achievements have been made. However, the majority of political discourse analysis just focused on analyzing the operating mechanism of linguistic signs in the discourse, because linguistic symbols have been attached greater importance than other non-verbal symbols. Nevertheless, linguists represented by Kress and van Leeuwen put forward that multimodal discourse analysis provides a research perspective for more comprehensive interpersonal meaning exploration, in that it takes all symbols of social resources including linguistic signs, visual images, colors, sounds, layout, etc. as meaningful resources to construct interpersonal meanings.Given the fact that traditionally most political discourse analyses take language as the centre of the social communication study, this paper intends to explore the interpersonal meaning of multimodal communicative modes in political speeches, based on the theoretical framework of Martin’s Appraisal theory and Norris’Multimodal Interaction theory, taking Michelle Obama’s2012DNC (Democratic National Convention) speech as an example. Specifically, the question explored is about how the speaker managed to use a variety of appraisal resources and quite a few non-verbal communicative modes to express her views, to establish good relationships with the audience, to help build a good image of Obama and, ultimately, to help Obama win more votes and support. The study shows that Michelle Obama actually employs rich appraisal resources in this speech to show her feelings, attitudes, positions and views. In addition, it is found that such non-verbal modes as facial expressions, movements, clothing and others used by Michelle also successfully contribute to the construction of the interpersonal meaning in the political discourse.Innovation of this paper is mainly reflected in the research method and the object of study. Regarding the research methodology, first, innovation of this study lies in the combination of Appraisal theory and Multimodal Interaction theory. While Martin’s appraisal theory is considered as the further development of Systemic Functional Linguistics in terms of interpersonal meaning, it focuses on the study of linguistic signs; Norris’ Multimodal Interaction theory pays more attention to interpret the functions of many other communicative modes. So the combination of these two theories can better explain how various modes in the multimodal discourse work together to construct meanings. Second, the paper tries to expand the scope of communicative modes by taking clothing, background music, etc. into consideration, which can be found in few traditional multimodal discourse studies. The study is expected to show that these modes also play an integral role in realizing the interpersonal meaning of political speeches. Besides, the object of political discourse analysis has always been those inaugural speeches delivered by American presidential candidates. In fact, the supporting speech delivered by the wife of presidential candidate is equally worth studying. That’s another innovation of this paper in which a successful supporting speech given by Barack Obama’s wife in2012Democratic National Convention is selected as the research object.