| The relationship between language and politics can be understood as political discourse.It is the speech act of politicians who aim to make the best use of language to achieve their political aspiration,or rather,to win support from the public,to consolidate their power and to protect their own or their group's interests.Interested in politicians' language strategy,the author sets out to study the inner language mechanism of political discourse by taking the American presidential campaign debates as a case.Starting from discourse,this study focuses on metadiscourse.Metadiscourse was first put forward by Harris in 1969,after that it has attracted the attention of scholars from the fields of rhetoric,pragmatics,cognitive linguistics,functional linguistics and so forth.Scholars like Williams(1981),Kopple(1985),Crismore(1969),Hyland(2005),and Adel(2006)etc.have further developed metadiscourse analysis,which then has become a major interest in discourse analysis.Based on the previous studies,Hyland(2005)divided interpersonal mode of metadiscourse into two dimensions of interaction: the interactive dimension and the interactional dimension.The former can be subcategorized into transitions,frame markers,endophoric markers,evidentials and code glosses,and the latter includes hedges,boosters,attitude markers,self mentions,and engagement markers.Taking Hyland's three principles and interpersonal mode of metadiscourse as theoretical foundation,the author selects the three presidential campaign debates of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016 and 2017,with the purpose of working out the following questions:(1)what are the respective distribution characteristics of metadiscourse of Trump and Clinton;(2)why are there similarities and differences in the distribution of each subcategory in their use of metadiscourse;(3)how does each subcategory achieve their functions.With the three questions,this paper analyzes the data collected from the three campaign debates by utilizing the software Antconc 3.2.4.Several steps are followed to conduct the analysis of the corpus.First,according to Hyland's schema of metadiscourse,all the metadiscourse items are identified and tagged.Second,the items of each subcategory are counted.Third,the total numbers of interactional metadiscourse and interactive metadiscourse are calculated,and their frequencies and percentage of total metadiscourse will be listed.At last,data findings are presented.The results reveal that metadiscourse is frequently used in the two candidates' debates,especially the use of self mentions and transitions,with engagement markers followed.Besides,there are both similarities and differences in the use of each subcategory between Trump and Clinton.The reasons of the above results attribute to their characteristics and career experiences.This study is expected to offer a clear understanding of metadiscourse in the genre of English political discourse and to gain some insightful ideas of the reasons and effects of the distributional characteristics held by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in their presidential campaign debates. |
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