| Projection is a type of language phenomenon which reports what has been said or thought by oneself or others. Philosophy, logic, semantics and stylistics have studied projection from various perspectives. Projection has been a research focus in Systemic-Functional Linguistic (henceforth SFL), which explores projection from logic and logic-semantic relationship. At present, most of the studies on projection in SFL focus on written discourse, such as news and academic text, but seldom touch upon spoken discourse, especially political debate.Based on the projection theory in SFL, this study adopts both quantitative analysis and qualitative description. With American televised presidential debates (henceforth TPD) in2008as research data, this thesis explores projection from projection structure, projecting source, and projecting verbs. This research aims to find out projection features in political debate discourse, and discuss how candidate uses projection resources to attack and isolate opponent, and then achieves the final purpose of aligning with audience. The study shows that there exist great numbers of projections in political debate discourse. In terms of projection structure, projection in political debate covers all the four sub-categories of projection, and the four subcategories distribute unevenly. Projection clause nexus and projection clause are overwhelmingly more than projection paragraph and projection group. This is interplayed by the nature of each projection sub-category and characteristics of televised presidential debate. In terms of logical relationship, hypotactic projection accounts vast majority. Since in political debate, candidate needs to give quick response and compared with projecting "wording" in paratactic projection, projecting "meaning" in hypotactic projection helps candidate control the debate. In terms of projecting source, self projection occurs most frequently among the four projecting sources. In terms of projecting verb, think, know and believe are found to co-occur with â… most frequently. They function as important sources for debater to express political views and refute opponent in political debate. This thesis explores the characteristics of projection used in US televised presidential debate and finds that projection is an important approach for debater to achieve the persuasion purpose. The research attempts to expand the discourse analysis in projection from written discourse to spoken discourse, and hopefully provides some implications for projection study in other types of spoken discourse. Furthermore, to some extent, this study may help shed some light on the issue of projection to both English teachers and learners. |
