A Study On Donald Trump’s Twitter Discourse On China From The Perspective Of Apprasial Theory

Based on Appraisal Theory,which examines languages from the perspective of the system of Attitude,Engagement and Graduation,the thesis examines the distribution of appraisal resources in Trump’s tweets containing word of “China” or “Chinese” from 2011 to 2017.This thesis is also concerned with how Trump tweets on China to pass his value judgement,evaluate a situation,a thing,or a person through the lexicogrammatical resources available in language.Attitude system,as the core and basic part of Appraisal Theory,deals with feelings,including emotional reactions,judgement of behavior and evaluation of things.It can be correspondingly divided into three sub-subsystems called Affect,Judgement and Appreciation.Engagement system refers to the way of evaluators participate in the discourse,and it can be divided into monogloss and heterogloss.Monoglossic utterances are those which make no reference to other voice and viewpoints,whereas heteroglossic utterances invoke or allow for dialogistic alternatives.And the latter can be further divided into dialogic contraction and dialogic expansion,both of which represent the polar points in a dialogic meaning continuum.Contraction resources are the resources which act to challenge,fend off or restrict the scope of positions and voices,and expansion resources are the resources which more or less entertain alternative positions and voices.Graduation system has to do with adjusting the degree of an evaluation or adjusting the strength of boundaries between boundaries,constructing core and peripheral types of things.It is concerned with the values of scaling in terms of force and focus.We extract 484 tweets containing keyword “China” or “Chinese” from TrumpTwitterArchive website,and carry out manual coding of each tweet under the Appraisal theory.Then we go on data analysis and observe that the negative affect resources on China account for the biggest share.Negative attitude resources are always intensified through the use of force resource.In terms of the Engagement system,Trump’s monoglossic statements take up a great part,which have the effect of presenting his assertions that rarely recognize or refer to alternative positions.Within the heterogloss,the contraction resources in our twitter discourse are more frequent than the expansion resources.Within the contraction resource,the disclaim resources outnumber the proclaim resources,which results in a contracted dialogic space and few outer voices in Trump’s twitter discourse.In terms of the Graduation system,the force resources are far more in quantity than the focus resources.Based on the data,our research also attempts to show through examples how Trump tweet China subjectively with the maintenance of specific ideological goals in his mind.On the whole,the present study is considered an attempt to combine Appraisal Theory with Trump’s twitter discourse.It sheds some light on how Trump perceives China,how diplomacy goes and eventually on twitter discourse as a new field of study.