A Contrastive Study Of The Appraisal Resources In Trump And Hillary's 2016 Presidential Campaign Speeches

Appraisal Theory was first proposed by James Martin in the 1990 s,which comprises three subsystems: attitude,engagement and graduation.This theory has been widely applied,by scholars at home and abroad,in literature analysis,translation,foreign language teaching,etc.As one kind of political speeches,presidential campaign speech plays a crucial role in the US political life and thus attracts the interests of many scholars.Most of the studies on presidential campaign speeches were carried out from the perspective of literary style,critical discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics.This study intends to make a comparative analysis of Trump and Hillary's 2016 American presidential campaign speeches,with the aim to explore the distribution features of the appraisal resources in the two candidates' speeches,in order to find out the similarities and differences between the two candidates' strategies in the choice of appraisal resources so as to achieve their respective political purposes,and the reasons caused these differences.Based on the theoretical framework of Appraisal Theory,the present thesis makes a contrastive analysis on the appraisal resources in the 20 speeches selecting randomly from all Trump and Hillary's 2016 presidential campaign speeches.The study first identifies the appraisal resources in the two candidates' speeches,then calculates the frequency and proportion of attitude,engagement and graduation resources as well as their respective subsystems.Based on the obtained data,this thesis probes into the distribution features of appraisal resources and makes a detailed analysis of the different strategies and the reasons led to the differences.Based on the analysis of the collected data,this thesis gets the following results.First of all,there are no significant differences in the proportions of attitude,engagement and graduation resources in Trump and Hillary's speeches,but they have prominent differences in the use of these resources.Within the system of attitude,Trump employed 60.26% judgement resources but Hillary used 41.16% affect resources.Trump used 59.46% negative resources,while Hillary adopted 71.59% positive resources.Within the system of engagement,Trump employed 38.85% monogloss and 30.21% dialogic contraction,but Hillary used 47.51% dialogic expansion.Within the system of graduation,more than 90% of the graduation resources are intensification in both candidates' speeches.Secondly,the two candidates employed different strategies in the use of appraisal resources,which is embodied in three aspects.Trump used negative judgement resources,he employed monogloss,dialogic contraction resources and sharpen resources.Hillary used more positive judgement resources,and she employed more dialogic expansion and soften resources.Thirdly,gender and identity are two possible factors that caused their different use of appraisal resources.The gender difference between the two candidates may contributes to their different use in attitude system while identity explains their differences in engagement and graduation resources.