A Positive Discourse Analysis Of Hillary Clinton's Campaign Speeches

As a public figure,Hillary is active in the political field.She has been a lawyer,the First Lady,senator and the Secretary of State.Hillary's speaking style was considered to be boring,tart,tough and decisive.Compared with her former speeches,Hillary has changed her speaking style this time.The speech of Remarks at Roosevelt Island,New York delivered on June 13 th,2016 was the prelude to competing for the 58 th president,which was full of passion,humor and individuality.Though Hillary does not realize her dream as the first woman president,she has been nominated as the first woman democratic candidate for the president and has won an obvious advantage of 230,000 popular votes.This thesis will make a positive discourse analysis of Hillary Clinton's campaign speeches within the framework of Appraisal Theory.Ten speeches are chosen randomly from the campaign speeches in 2016.This thesis intends to study the various ways in which Hillary Clinton expresses her views,attitudes and standpoint so as to construct the alignment and solidarity with the audience.According to the research purpose,two research questions are drawn:(1)What types of appraisal resources are in Hillary Clinton's campaign speeches?(2)How do the appraisal resources distribute in Hillary Clinton's campaign speeches?The present research is based on Appraisal Theory,which is developed from the interpersonal meanings of Systemic Functional Linguistics.The thesis is conducted from attitude,engagement and graduation system.First,the speeches will be identified and annotated according to the appraisal theory and together with common words in English which express attitudes.Then the thesis will make a statistical analysis of the distribution of appraisal resources.Last,the thesis will reveal the implication of various appraisal resources.The research indicates that the appraisal resources are very rich in Hillary's campaign speeches,of which positive evaluation are foregrounded.Three kinds of appraisal resources are in them,which distribute unbalancedly.“Attitude” resources are most frequently used,next come the “graduation” resources,and the frequency of the “engagement” resources are less than the other two,but there is little difference between “graduation” and “engagement” resources.Within the system “Attitude”,Hillary uses “affect” resources and “judgement” resources to align herself with the audience on the aspects of emotional and moral feelings.The present research can conclude that Hillary constructs alignment and solidarity mainly from the attitude resources.