Analyses Of English Political Speeches From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Political speeches are full of intense emotion,diversified in various genres and rich in language.Speakers of political discourses gradually impact audience's own value orientation to judge and identify events through the appeal of feelings,sharp judgment and interactive dialogue with cohesive and sharp language.With the development of society,people have increasingly diversified their ways of communicating and acquiring information.Televised presidential debates emerge at the right moment.As a kind of political speeches,televised presidential debates play a decisive role in the U.S.presidential election.Appraisal Theory is a theory of "human" in interpersonal function and mainly focuses on evaluation resources in discourse.Appraisal Theory is based on the paradigm of Halliday's systemic functional grammar,goes beyond some influential linguistic schools of the 21 st century which focus on the areas of function and symbol,discourse and rhetoric,and communicative effect.It also provides new ways to study these issues.There are many studies about appraisal theory and political speeches before,but analysis about televised presidential debates is still rare.This thesis chooses Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's televised presidential Debates as the texts,and analyzes the texts from the perspective of three subsystems of Appraisal Theory.Three televised presidential debates are integrated into one text.With the help of UAM Corpus Tool,each evaluative word can be determined the nature and statistics can generate automatically.There are many evaluation resources found in the texts after data analysis.Some conclusions are as follows:Firstly,Trump and Hillary both use many attitude resources in that expressing attitude explicitly is beneficial to audience's making choice quickly and correctly.But Trump used more attitude resources than Hillary,which implies Trump prefers to use attitude resources to narrow the distance between audience.Secondly,Trump and Hillary both prefer to use force resources in graduation system,and the raise resources in force resources are most frequently appeared.It can be concluded that the speakers often use a rising attitude to express their views to the maximum extent,in order to get the audience's support and establish alliances with them.Thirdly,as far as the distribution of engagement resources is concerned,they both would rather use dialogic contraction than dialogic expansion.Because televised presidential debates have no fixed text,the most frequently used way for speakers is to refute the rival.But Trump employed relatively more dialogic contraction than Hillary,which implies Trump is more inclined to make instant reactions to others' words.This study aims to apply Appraisal Theory to Trump and Hillary's Television debates.The thesis mainly evaluates the television debates of Trump and Hillary from three aspects: attitude system,engagement system and graduation system.Evaluating the universality and existing features of resource distribution in English political discourses can reveal the candidate's attitude,viewpoint and position systematically through the exploration of the evaluation resources in speeches and the application of language strategy.And it is hoped that this study can make some contributions to the application of Appraisal Theory in different fields.