A Study On American Presidential Debates In 2016 From The Perspective Of Ethos

The quadrennial American presidential campaign often attracts world attention.As an important part of the campaign,the American presidential debate has aroused hundreds of scholars' interests for the candidate's performance in the debate exerts a significant impact on the final election.During the American presidential debate in 2016,the two candidates have a fierce battle of tongue and show their sarcastic attitudes towards their opponents.And they work hard to use rhetorical strategies to shape their respective image among the voters,try their best to narrow the emotional and psychological distance with the voters and,at the same time,attack each other and defend themselves in order to win more support.Accordingly,ethos has played an important role in the American presidential debates in 2016.Ethos is one of the most persuasive rhetorical devices proposed by Aristotle.This thesis explores Aristotle's theory of ethos and its development in contemporary research.Ethos is also used as the theoretical framework of this thesis.The three presidential television campaign debates in 2016 from the White House website are selected as the research texts.This study starts from making statistics of the frequency of the use of three components of ethos,named good sense,virtue,goodwill,used by two candidates in the presidential debates in an attempt to figure out their differences in using them.Then,based on the hot topics of the presidential election debates and the purposes of the research,the thesis selects the typical examples from both candidates for qualitative analysis.It tries to analyze how the two candidates select language from the angle of ethos to preach their proposals and persuade the voters and win the support of the voters by constructing their own characters and attacking their opponents'.This study shows that under different rhetorical situations,both candidates show their good judgments and their firm determinations to overcome difficulties by citing a large number of facts and data,as well as the discourse of different authorities.At the same time,the two sides also exemplify and highlight their noble virtues.Through the extensive use of first person plural “we”,the two candidates try to narrow the psychological distance with the audience and embody their friendly intentions of serving the people.At the same time,both candidates also slander and attack their opponents strongly from the perspectives of good sense,virtue and goodwill.The statistics in this thesis show that the frequency of ethos used by the two candidates differs in the three presidential debates.This study has some practical values.In theory,this thesis verifies and demonstrates the feasibility of ethos in contemporary political debates in order to deepen people's understanding of this theory.In practice,it helps to raise people's critical linguistic awareness and improve their understanding of politics,which means understanding the speaker's political intentions and communicative purposes through the superficial language.