A Study On Hillary Clinton's 2016 American Presidential Debates From The Perspective Of Identification Theory

The United States ushered in the quadrennial presidential election in 2016.Former Secretary of State and New York Senator Hillary Clinton was nominated by the Democratic Party,becoming the first woman to formally launch a major candidacy for the president.As an essential part of the election campaign,American presidential debates have attracted worldwide attention.With the help of her powerful eloquence,deep insight and female identity,Hillary Clinton manages to convey her political opinions and personal charisma to persuade the audience to vote for her.Although Donald Trump won the presidential election,Hillary Clinton's nationwide popular vote has taken the lead over Trump,and scientific opinion polls show that she is the winner of all three rounds of presidential debates.Therefore,her brilliant presidential debates deserve special attention and research.Kenneth Burke ranks as the founder of New Rhetoric in the 20 th century,and his rhetoric system is extensive and profound,the core of which is Identification Theory.Rhetoric is a kind of communicative activity that regulates interpersonal relations.Identification emphasizes the settlement of divergence and the achievement of understanding in mutual relations.As a common rhetorical strategy,identification strategy is a conscious language choice of the speaker in a given communicative context and has special rhetorical effects.In recent years,Burke's New Rhetoric has aroused widespread concern of scholars and has been carried out relevant researches in many fields,providing a new rhetorical perspective for discourse analysis.However,few studies have applied this theory to presidential debates.This study attempts to analyze Hillary Clinton's 2016 American presidential debates from the perspective of Kenneth Burke's Identification Theory,aiming to uncover the rhetorical process of Hillary Clinton and to explore how she applies identification strategies to seek identification with the audience and what rhetorical effects they achieve.This study starts from analyzing identification strategies used by Hillary Clinton in the presidential debates from the aspects of rhetorical content and rhetorical form,and makes statistics on the frequency of the use of these strategies in an attempt to figure out her preference for them.Then it explores how Hillary Clinton achieves identification with the audience by adopting these strategies.Finally,the rhetorical effects of identification strategies applied by Hillary Cliton are analyzed in detail.Through the analysis,it can be found that Hillary Clinton is really an excellent debater and outstanding rhetor.The use of identification strategies makes her debating so convincing and contributes to overcoming the division from the audience and thus inducing cooperation.As for rhetorical content,three strategies are adopted by her including identification by sympathy,identification by antithesis and identification by inaccuracy.As for rhetorical form,she mainly adopts repetitive form,progressive form and figurative form.She achieves identification by sympathy from three aspects: sharing common values,showing noble characters as well as inspiring shared emotions.When it comes to problems confronted by the United States,she employs identification by antithesis to call on the public to work together against the “common enemies”,like cyber attacks,terrorist attacks and racial discrimination.Identification by inaccuracy resorts to the first person plural to transfer her ideology to the public without notice.By adopting repetitive form,Hillary Clinton manages to convey what she tries to emphasize.Progressive form is very reasonable and logic,which drags the audiences' mind to follow her thoughts step by step.Besides,figurative form is widely adopted to make arguments vivid and attractive,mainly including parallelism,contrast and irony.According to statistics,it is noted that Hillary Clinton prefers to adopt the strategies of sympathy and figurative form to achieve identification with the audience.Moreover,she applies different types of content and formal identification strategies to achieve certain rhetorical effects,such as praising herself,attacking the opponent and defending herself.This thesis not only broadens the research field of American presidential debates to help people better appreciate Hillary Clinton's argumentation art,but also effectively validates the explanatory power of Identification Theory to presidential debates and enriches the study of political discourse from rhetoric perspective.It promotes people to choose appropriate identification strategies to enhance communicative skills and realize their motives.In addition,it provides some guidance for English teaching and learning as well as English debates.