A Comparative Analysis Of Trump's And Hillary's Campaign Speeches Based On SFL:An Appraisal Approach

This thesis aims to study how Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton made campaign speeches in 2016 presidential election and attempts to explain why a political freshman could be elected as the president rather than a sophisticated politician from the perspective of appraisal theory.The 2016 Presidential Election of the United States was the 58th presidential election.Whatever the final results would be in this election,a new historical record would be made.Finally,Trump became the first American president who has never held any public offices.So what made the American people choose him and give up the candidate who has rich political experience and the political networking?In this paper,20 campaign speeches made by Hillary and Trump will be analyzed from the perspective of the appraisal theory in order to have a better understanding of what helped Trump succeed in the presidential election.The theoretical framework is mainly based on appraisal theory,which is the extension of the interpersonal meaning of the systemic functional grammar.When Martin built the whole appraisal system in 2005,it was mainly divided into three aspects:attitude,engagement and graduation.It focuses on the evaluation meaning of language and intersubjectivity of language.In addition,corpus tools are used as assisting tools in this thesis to calculate the frequency of various evaluation resources and select the most representative corpus.By analyzing Trump and Hilary's speeches,we can understand how they perceive their relationship with other subjects and how they can build the relationship between the speaker and the audience.Based on the analysis of attitude resources,engagement resources and graduation resources in Trump's and Hillary's speeches,conclusions are reached as follow:First,Trump and Hilary have completely different styles of addressing speeches.Trump was dominating,dynamic and sarcastic,while Hillary presented an objective,sophisticated and cautious style;Second,Trump more frequently utilized invoked judgement resources,which made his speeches more sarcastic and critical for audience;Third,compared to Hilary,Trump showed a more distinctive personal style in the choices of engagement resources.He inclined to utilized high-value modalization forms to make a more clear position in his speeches and align his audience through the shared value.In his speeches,the sense of others and the sense of us are expressed in quite a number of ways and that strengthens the sense of collectivity between him and his supporters.The research done in this paper confirms the explanatory power of the appraisal theory in the study of the discourse of speeches and it also shows that the appraisal theory can be applied to campaign speeches.