A Study On The Attitude System Of Donald Trump’s Twitter Discourse From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Twitter is considered as one of the most popular social media platform with what people communicate online from all over the world since 2006.The language of Twitter worth studying because of its limitation of 140 characters which makes the language unique and different from other types of rhetoric.Donald Trump,the 45 th President of the United States of America is an active Twitter user who posted a considerable amount of comments on China.This thesis aims to reveal how Appraisal Theory can be applied to the study of Twitter corpus concerning its features and social significance on the basis of Martin’s theory.The thesis takes Donald Trump’s Twitter posts from 2011 to 2014 with the keyword “China”and builds a corpus based on 387 Twitter posts.The analysis of the data indicates that 1)among three attitudinal resources,Judgment resources takes the largest proportion of all the distribution and Affect is the least frequent used resources 2)there are far more negative attitudinal resources than positive attitudinal resources in the tweets from Donald Trump with the word “China”3)Donald Trump expressed his attitude towards China with more explicit resource than implicit resource.The conclusion is that Donald Trump took advantage of attitude resources under the framework of Martin’s Appraisal Theory to make people feel related,to widespread and reinforce his statements and to prepare himself for running for the president.The thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One is an introduction to the entire thesis and it introduces the research background,research question,significance of the research result along with the organization of the thesis.Chapter Two gives a brief introduction to Appraisal Theory and literature reviews of studies on Appraisal Theory and Internet and Twitter language.Chapter Three is the theoretical framework which is the theoretical guidance of Appraisal Theory.Chapter Four and Chapter Five is the main body of the whole thesis,which is essentially composed of the research design and data analysis of 387 Twitter posts of Donald Trump from 2011 to 2014.And it comes to the conclusion in Chapter Six of the findings and limitations of the research and the suggested future studies as well.