Research On US Televised Presidential Debates In 2012 From The Perspective Of The Appraisal Theory

The US Televised Presidential Debates belong to the genre of political discourse and play a decisive role in the presidential election held for every four years. With the view of winning voters, the candidates need to play all their cards to present to the electorate their personal charisma, the validity and valuation of their domestic and diplomatic policies; attacking their opponents’ character, behaviours and policies is also a strategy of winning electorate. During the 2012 Presidential Debates, in order to win the presidency, the two candidates—Obama and Romney-employ all kinds of appraisal resources to evaluate their rivals’ character,behaviours and policies etc, and to establish alignment with the voters.The Appraisal Theory, founded by Martin in the 1990s, is a discourse-semantic system based on the research of interpersonal meaning of Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Linguistics. It concerns about the attitudes being negotiated,the intensity of affect,and the way of aligning readers, and includes the three subsystems of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Since its establishment, it has been applied to various discourses, but the application on Presidential Debates is rather rare and none is conducted to explain the reasons of winning and failure.This thesis, from the perspective of the Appraisal Theory, is conducted to explore the reasons of Obama’s winning and/or Romney’s failure, and try to excavate the hidden ideologies of the Democratic and Republican Parties represented by the two candidates.