Positive Discourse Analysis Of Hillary Clinton's Presidential Campaign Speeches Based On Appraisal Theory

An impassioned speech not only inspires us,but also plays a vital role in the process of society development.As one of the most influential language forms in the modern world,political speech has attracted more and more language scholars' attention in the form of written or oral text.There are lots of researches on political speech.Some do researches on the style of the speeches and even the figures of speech,while other scholars carry out the researches on texts from different fields.However,few researches are on presidential campaign elections.Therefore,this thesis does a study on presidential campaign speeches given by Hillary Clinton.As the first female candidate in American presidential campaign,Hillary has won a solid support among women.She continuously mentions the importance of leaving a better living condition to the descendants.Besides,to make the voters believe that she is the most likely person who can solve the income inequality problem and help the middle class,Hillary even shares her own experience as grandmother.The message she gives on economic policy highlights the problems shared among women,for example,improving the minimum wage,providing sick leave,supporting preschool education and reasonable tax-funded childcare.Therefore,it has attracted the world's attention on how she expresses her political ambitions and ideas.In this thesis,texts are studied from the perspective of PDA(Positive Discourse Analysis)proposed by Martin in1999.As the supplement and improvement of Critical Discourse Analysis,PDA advocates analyzing the discourse from constructive perspective,and PDA promotes a positive and peaceful attitude towards various social problems and contradictions.Unlike Critical Discourse Analysis,PDA aims to build a harmonious and beautiful society through discourse analysis rather than show the relationship between the ideology and power.Therefore,it is a brand-new attempt to analyze the presidential campaign speeches from positive discourse analysis perspective.As an extension and supplement of Halliday's Systemic-Functional grammar,appraisal theory tends to evaluate the appraisal resources in the discourse and explores how the language is used at the lexical level.This thesis uses attitude system which is one sub-system of appraisal theory as the theoretical framework,and it does the research from the perspective of positive discourse analysis,trying to answer the following three questions:(1)How are the sub-systems of attitude system distributed in the speeches?(2)What are the possible reasons for the distribution of sub-systems in terms of lexical choice?(3)What effect does the attitude system have on the speeches?In this thesis,both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted so that the distribution of three sub-systems of attitude system can be deeply analyzed.Quantitative is adopted to calculate the distribution and frequency of the attitudinal resources,and qualitative method is used to analyze the data in the three sub-systems of attitude system,stating the ways that the speaker expresses her attitude and political goals.After a deep analysis,the major findings of this study are summarized as follows: first,among the three sub-systems of attitude system,the judgement is the most frequently used,and affect is the second.The appreciation is the least used.The proportion of them is47.7%,42.8% and 9.5% respectively.Second,Hillary mainly adopts judgement sub-system to make people have a positive attitude to her,and she strongly emphasizes her ability of being a good president in order to make the audience believe her.Meanwhile,she also uses the affect sub-system to express her positive feeling,which can arise the American people's echoes and then support her.In the whole speeches,the appreciation sub-system is the least used one.As according to the definition given by Martin,appreciation sub-system mainly concerns evaluations to people's behaviors,which is easy to cause the chaos amongpeople.Third,two positive effects have achieved by using attitude system.One is it can align the American people through empathizing,the other is it can rebuild the public's confidence in solving and improving their situations.