A Comparative Study Of The Inaugural Addresses Of President Obama And Trump From The Perspective Of Attitude In Appraisal Theory

Inaugural addresses are the prologue for the newly-elected American presidents stepping onto the political stage.They seize the opportunity to show their position,to illustrate political ideas and to make promises,whose aims are to motivate American public and to gain their support.The words in the inaugural addresses are refined and the whole texts are strongly logical.Because the audience is American public,the addresses have ample interpersonal meanings.Appraisal Theory is a new theory based on Systemic Functional Linguistics.It focuses that a speaker holds positive or negative attitude towards people,events,phenomenon and so on and how a speaker shows his or her attitude and position.There are three subsystems in Appraisal Theory: attitude,engagement and graduation.Under the guidance of Appraisal Theory,this thesis makes a contrastive analysis between Obama's inaugural address of 2013 and Trump's inaugural address of 2017 from the perspective of attitude subsystem.And qualitative and quantitative analysis are selected in this thesis.Firstly,the distribution of attitude resource is respectively found out in Obama's inaugural address and Trump's inaugural address.Secondly,the thesis illustrates with examples how the two presidents use these attitude resources to persuade American public to support them.Finally,the thesis makes a contrastive analysis to find out the similarities and differences of distribution of attitude resource between Obama's inaugural address and Trump's inaugural address.The differences reflect respective presentation skills of the two presidents.Here are the conclusions by contrastive analysis.Firstly,there are abundant attitude resource in both Obama's and Trump's inaugural addresses.But the number of attitude resource in Obama's inaugural address is more than that in Trump's.Secondly,in the subsystems of attitude,both the two presidents use abundant appreciation words.President Obama uses more judgement words than affect words while president Trump is totally opposite.He uses more affect words than judgement words.It indicates that president Obama is inclined to use judgement words to illustrate new policies while president Trump is apt to use affect words to closedistance with American public.According to the contrastive results,attitude resource utilized in presidential inaugural addresses can make a better effect of speech.Therefore,later statesmen even common speakers can apply this method into their speeches.