An Analysis Of Populism In Trump's Tweets Based On Appraisal Theory

Donald J.Trump,the Tweeting President rightful to his name has led the way of social media in a new generation.In the meanwhile,Twitter has also helped with the realization of his political ambition.Apparently,social media is playing an even more significant role in the political society.This thesis takes Trump's tweets as study object,populism as starting point,Attitudinal Sub-System in J.R.Martin's Appraisal Theory as theoretical framework and adopts qualitative methodology principally.On account of interwovenness between Populism and People,this thesis collects and analyzes POTUS Trump's 70 tweets with the keyword "people" with over 100,000 likes on his verified Twitter account.There are three research questions to be solved:What are the occurrences and distributions of the Attitudinal resources in Trump's Tweets?What are the characteristic linguistic features of Trump's Twitter Discourse?In what ways are the Attitudinal resources related to Populism?On account of the segmentation of Attitudinal Framework from Appraisal Theory,by manual marking and Excel statistics,this thesis analyzes attitudinal resources in Trump's tweets,in order to sort out their relevance with typical Populist discourse logics.The major findings are as follows:There are considerable attitudinal resources amongst Trump's Tweets with no significant variation.The Appreciation resources make up the most proportion,Judgement ones make the second,and Affect is least used;Under Appraisal framework,there are several linguistic features revealed:Trump uses Appreciation most and Affect least in order to make his discourse appear logical;Explicit resources take up the majority;Trump has an obvious preference to exaggeration for his purpose is to draw attention.The attitudinal resources in Trump's tweets are related to Populism in the following ways:a binary opposition of antagonism between the people and its direct political representative;constant reference to the people;Americanism.The research on Trump's tweets could help us to identify his deep-hidden political tendency,to better read his characteristics,and so as to comprehend the Internet populism nowadays with appropriate preparation eventually.