| Appraisal Theory-first put forward by James Martin and other functional linguists in the 1990 s.This theory is applied to interpret and describe language,including three sub-systems: Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.Attitudinal system as the core of Appraisal Theory,it mainly involves the speaker or author how to apply the appraisal language to show his emotion,judgment of things and appreciation of events.In the past few years,Attitude System has been utilized to analyze different types of discourses,such as commercial advertisements,law regulations,literary works and tourism discourses.But it is rarely applied for analyzing political debates especially presidential campaign debates given by Hillary and Trump.The corpus of this thesis comes from three television debates of presidential campaign between Trump and Hillary in 2016.Based on the hot topics of debates and research purposes,the author selected examples from the TV debates to conduct a quantitative and qualitative research.The self-built small corpora was applied through the use of Ant Conc corpus retrieval tool and a manual search method.The corpus tool proceeds a comprehensive statistics,and then forms the tables of data distributions and figures of attitudinal resources.Major findings are achieved as follows.Similarity:there are plentiful attitudinal resources in the campaign debate.Three subsystems of Attitude System---Affect,Judgment and Appreciation are all involved in the corpus.Differences: In terms of Affect resources,Trump mainly adopts plentiful Dissatisfaction to covey his affect meanings.However,Hillary prefers un/happiness and in/security to covey her affect meanings.In terms of Judgment resources,Trump adopts more positive aspects of the ability to demonstrate leadership skills.Hillary uses a large amount of positive tenacity resources to affirm herself and negatively attacks Trump.In terms of Appreciation resources,Trump applies more positive Composition resources to convey practical plans plan for prosperity.Clinton tends to use a large amount of positive Valuation resources to promote political and official voices to express authority to the audience for getting more votes.We can obtain how the linguistics resources in the presidential campaign debates between Hillary and Trump are applied to realize the interpersonal meaning through the analysis.(1)Trump uses a large number of negative attitude resources in the debate to attack and destroy opponents and defend himself,while Hillary uses positive attitude resources to ingratiate herself with the audience,but she is not convinced by the public;(2)Trump tends to use more "objective" Appreciation resources to make the debate more influential and objective,and Clinton prefers to use "subjective" Judgment resources to make the debate less persuasive and trustworthy.This thesis examined the feasibility and applicability of the attitudinal resources in Appraisal Theory in analyzing the presidential campaign’ s TV debates,while provided valuable inspiration for further research on Appraisal Theory,the English debate and English language learning. |
