An Analysis Of Engagement Resources In U.S. Presidential Debates

U.S.presidential debates are indispensable in U.S.presidential election campaign.In those debates,the presidential candidates deal with complicated interpersonal relationships,negotiate with various attitudes and stances,and interact with different voices through skillful debate language to achieve their political purposes.Thus,as typical political discourses,U.S.presidential debates have rich interpersonal meanings and skillful language resources,which have attracted many scholars to study.Appraisal Theory,proposed by J.R.Martin,is a development of Systemic Functional Linguistics on interpersonal meanings.Appraisal Theory focuses on the interpersonal meanings construed by the evaluative language with various attitudes and stances from the angle of discourse semantics.Appraisal Theory consists of three interacting subsystems: Attitude,Graduation and Engagement.Engagement system provides a heteroglossic backdrop for different attitudes and voices in discourses,which corresponds to the dialogic features of U.S.presidential debates.However,studies on U.S.presidential debates are mainly from the perspectives of Systemic Functional Linguistics,Critical Discourse Analysis and so on.Few researches of U.S.presidential debates have been conducted from the angle of Engagement system in Appraisal Theory.The corpus of this thesis is the text version of the 2016 U.S.presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump selected from the official website of the influential newspaper—the Washington Post.Based on the framework of Engagement system in Appraisal Theory,this thesis adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the distribution features and realization of Engagement resources,and further to reveal the candidates' strategies of Engagement resources selection in U.S.presidential debates.After detailed analysis,the findings are concluded as follows:(1)Engagement resources are widely employed and distribute unevenly in 2016 U.S.presidential debate.Dialogic Contraction resources are employed far more frequently than Dialogic Expansion resources with 73.43% and 26.57% respectively of all the Engagement resources.In Dialogic Contraction,Disclaim resources are six times more than Proclaim resources.The two subtypes of Disclaim,Deny resources(32.92%)and Counter resources(30.34%)are nearly equal,which rank firstly and secondly respectively in the whole Engagement resources.In Dialogic Expansion,Entertain and Attribute account for 17.46% and 9.11% respectively.(2)The differences in distribution of Engagement resources are decided by the different functions of various Engagement resources in realizing interpersonal meanings and the genres of discourses.(3)Different Engagement resources play different roles in realizing interpersonal meanings.Dialogic Contraction resources show candidates' firm value positions and clear political stances by suppressing or excluding alternative voices,while Dialogic Expansion resources present the politeness and modesty of candidates by leaving space for various voices.In view of the primary purpose of U.S.presidential debates is to win more supports from the electorate,the firm and clear political stances are of particular importance to the candidates.(4)The strategies of Engagement resources selection in U.S.presidential debates are exposed from three aspects: preference of Dialogic Contraction;weakening of external sources;enhancement of authority and alignment with electorate.This study gives a detailed analysis of U.S.presidential debates based on Engagement system.It is hoped to broaden the research fields of Appraisal Theory,especially the Engagement system.It's also hoped to help people understand political debates better and give enlightenment on pedagogy of debate language.