A Study On Prosodic Structure In Presidential Debates From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

American presidential debates,as a great event for American presidential election,gain wide attention from the public all over the world.In order to ultimately win the election,candidates are expected to fully manipulate the interpersonal relationship and display their extraordinary language ability.Therefore how to present good performance,show self-qualifications and refute rival’s arguments in the debates is of great importance for candidates.And it is inevitable to make evaluation to certain policies and regulations so as to further express one’s attitudes and points,which is concerned with Appraisal Theory proposed by Martin.Appraisal Theory is the further development of interpersonal metafunction proposed by Halliday,which probes into the lexical resources with appraisal meaning from the perspective of Attitude,Engagement and Graduation subsystems.In this paper,Attitude subsystem is the analysis perspective of my study.And Appraisal Theory is also the theoretical resource of prosodic structure of attitude we termed in the paper.The concept of prosody in SFL has been extended to the level of grammar and semantics,termed as syntagmatic organization of language(Matthiessen,et al.,2010:166).The prosody of attitude refers to the prosody of interpersonal meaning,that is,attitude resources can be used as the tone and mood of discourse to form a certain kind of prosody.With the development of discourse,the resonance between the attitude resources is like the melody of music running in the discourse,thus enhancing or decreasing the author’s attitude.Martin & White proposed three kinds of prosody,saturation,intensification and domination.Therefore,the author selects three presidential debates in 2016 as the research corpus,grounding Appraisal Theory and combining Attitude subsystem and Prosody Theory to make a systematic analysis on the prosodic structure of attitude in presidential debates.Three research questions are addressed:(1)What types of prosodic structure are constructed through attitudinal resources by candidates?(2)What features of prosodic structure can be shown in presidential debates?(3)What are the functions of the prosodic structure delivered by candidates in presidential debates? In order to find the answers,the author makes a series of instance analysis,and summarizes the formation of attitudinal prosodic structure in presidential debates.On the basis of constructing analytical framework and qualitative analysis,the author also sorts out and gives tags to collected corpus with the help of UAM CorpusTool and carries out the quantitative analysis to obtain the characteristics of attitudinal prosody in presidential debates.And we obtain the following major findings.As for the prosodic structure formed by three types of attitudinal resources,Affect appears mostly in dominating prosody as the superordinate attitude,which accounts for almost 1/2 of the total Affect resources.Of the rest two structures formed by Affect resources,saturating prosody largely exceeds the intensifying prosody.In terms of Judgment,the constructed saturating prosody is much higher than other kinds of structure.Compared with Affect,ratio of intensifying prosody of Judgment is larger than that of Affect,while dominating prosody is rather limited than that of Affect.With respect to Appreciation,the frequency of saturating prosody is the highest,and the frequency of dominating prosody takes the second place.However,the intensifying prosody appears for the least time,accounting for nearly half of saturating prosody.In terms of the polarity,prosodic structures conveying positive evaluation tend to be dominant while negative one is generally used to extend the mood of positive one.Therefore,it can be concluded that the prosodic structure constructed in presidential debates would be positive.With respect to the explicitness of prosodic strucure,the distribution of implicit attitude resource is rather limited than that of explicit expression.And the adoption of implicit resource aims to intensifying the evaluation of explicit attitude resource to some extent.On the basis of the whole analysis,the author also analyze the functions of prosodic structure of attitude,that is shortening the distance and evoking the resonance of audience,attacking the opponent and refuting attacks,making acclaims and enhancing self-qualification.The research intends to explore the prosodic structure constructed by attitudinal resources in presidential debates.The outcomes of study will help readers understand the positions of candidates and also give readers some useful guidance in debates or other occasions.But it should be noted that the present study is merely concerned with the analysis of presidential debates from linguistic perspective,excluding other non-verbal factors or political factors.