A Functional Evaluation Study Of Engagement And Graduation Resources In U.S. Presidential Debates

Televised presidential debates play a vitally important role in American presidential campaign.Among them,the televised presidential debates in 2016 between Trump and Hillary is the most heated.How candidates use language to maintain complicated interpersonal relationships in such a unique discourse is worth studying.This paper intends to analyze the transcripts of the debates from the perspective of Graduation and Engagement System.The purposes of the study are to find out how the various engagement and graduation resources are employed to realize personal stances as well as interpersonal meaning in U.S.televised presidential debates.In addition,the paper conducts a tentative research on how to achieve debating goals with discourse prosody and evaluative gravity.Based on several steps of evaluation resources analyses,we could find that: 1.for Engagement,the types of two candidates fall in roughly the same pattern.The dialogic contraction is the most preferred category in the presidential debates.It helps the candidates present the definite viewpoints and fits in with the requirements of candidates' attack and defense.While within disclaim type,Trump uses more deny and counter resources than Hillary;2.for Graduation,the Force resources abound in the presidential debates.What is more,the extensive adoption of Raising and Sharpening enforces the candidates' viewpoints,enhances the power of persuasion of the language they use.However,Trump and Hillary use the up-scaling resources to emphasize different aspects.Trump is a challenger so he uses this kind of resources to reveal Hillary's inaction.While Hillary as secretary,she deteriorates the situation her administration once faced in order to extol her past deeds by strengthening the volume of her investment;3.for prosody,the engagement resources and graduation resources show different patterns in the debates.The engagement resources present the mode of dispersion and the graduation resources present the mode of of wave.Both modes construe a harmonious unity in presidential debates;4.for evaluative gravity,it differentiates the evaluative resources with different degree of relevance to the context.The higher the semantic gravity and evaluative gravity are,the more the evaluative resources related to the context.Thus they are not a core evaluation,and vice versa.