A Pragma-Dialectical Study Of Personal Attack In The US Presidential Debates

The year 2016 witnessed another year of American presidential election.The two candidates---Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton were asked to answer the questions posed by the moderator,the audience or picked from the Internet users during the debates.When answering questions,the candidates must explain or refute in allusion to the doubts or disagreement.From this perspective,the candidates' reply is a typical argumentative discourse.Sometimes in order to increase the possibility of winning,the candidates often adopt personal attacks to refute his or her opponent by denigrating his or her character and skills or by questioning the standpoint of the opponent.Under the framework of Pragma-Dialectics and taking the three debates in 2016 US Election as the research data,this paper analyzes and evaluates the personal attacks used by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.Research results show that three types of personal attacks are used in Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's debates,namely,abusive personal attack,circumstantial personal attack and You Too.The abusive personal attack can be further divided into four types: attacking person with bad character,attacking person with bad faith,attacking person with low intelligence and attacking person with low expertise.The circumstantial personal attack can be divided into two types,namely attacking person with suspicious motives and attacking person with suspicious interest.As to the You Too type,inconsistency with one's past and present words and only words and no actions are further divided.What's more,dissociation is also used in the two candidates' debates.Soundness criteria for different types of personal attacks are devised in the paper.The criteria are used to evaluate whether the personal attacks used by the two candidates are reasonable or fallacious.According to soundness criteria,most of the personal attacks used by the two candidates are fallacious.Donald Trump commits the fallacy of describing the other party as sleazy,unintelligent,of casting doubt on the other party's interest and of pointing out the inconsistency between one's past and present words while Hillary Clinton commits the fallacy of taking Donald Trump as disloyal,of casting doubt on the opponent's motive.