| The Presidential Weekly Address is an important window on the political orientations and positions of the government.The American president routinely delivers his address to his people every week and demonstrates his administration's attitude and stance on the current critical issues and thereby the Presidential Weekly Address plays a great role in Americans' political life.Until now,most researches have focused on Trump's election and inaugural speeches while his Weekly Address is equally important but gets few researchers' attention.Based on the realization and distribution of Attitude resources,this research explores his administration's ideology reflected in Trump's Weekly Addresses with the framework of Appraisal Theory.Martin's Appraisal Theory,rooted in Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics,is a development of interpersonal function.AT consists of Attitude,Engagement and Graduation,among which Attitude is the core of the whole theory.Attitude deals with the negotiation of attitudes,views and stances between the writer and the reader in the discourse.Its three sub-systems: Affect,Judgement and Appreciation manifest the speaker's attitude from emotional,esthetic and aesthetic aspects respectively.Owing to the limited space,this research only takes Attitude system as the theoretical framework to investigate the governmental attitude and position based on attitudinal resources in the addresses.42 typical addresses are selected from total 60 Weekly Addresses that Trump delivered from 2017 to 2018 to build a small-sized corpus.With the assistance of UAM corpus tool 3.3,the thesis repeatedly annotates attitudinal resources in the corpus and analyzes its distributive features with the statistical data.The specific realizing forms of Attitude system are presented through a qualitative analysis from aspects of the polarity and explicitness.Based on the result of the qualitative and quantitative analysis,this thesis discusses American administration's value and ideology from three dimensions of American public,partisan Congress and international relations.It is found that there are abundant attitudinal resources in Trump's WeeklyAddresses.Among attitudinal resources,Judgement resources are employed most,Appreciation second and Affect least;the distribution of positive attitudinal resources(73.99%)far surpasses that of the negative ones(26.30%),demonstrating that Trump intends to communicate his optimism to people;there is no stark difference between the explicit and implicit Attitude resources.Trump employs multiple linguistic forms to express the governmental attitude.Affect is realized most by the inscribed resources of nouns and verbs;Judgement is realized by the invoked resources of lexical metaphors,the ideational meaning,Graduation resources and the modalisation system;Appreciation is realized by the inscribed and the invoked resources.The Critical Discourse Analysis of Trump's speeches is demonstrated from three dimensions of his ideology: the first dimension concerns strengthening American people's cultural and national identity,the second damaging the rival's credibility to gain people's support,and the third legitimizing American diplomatic stance.The orientation of nationalism reflects the clear interests division between self and others.Within the framework of Appraisal Theory,this research conducts a Critical Discourse Analysis of Trump's political discourse to provide enlightenment for Sino-US relations.Simultaneously,the research promotes readers' sensitivity to the political discourse and their appreciation of it.This research inevitably has limitations and thus makes three suggestions that the future research should center on one theme,other types of Trump's speeches be also worthy of attention,and Engagement and Graduation resources be researched so as to enrich the studies on Trump's political discourse.In a word,this research looks forward to the further improvement. |
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