Analysis Of Persuasive Function In The Democratic Party Team's Electioneering E-mails From The Perspective Of Interpersonal Function

In 2016,the United States began a new presidential campaign.E-mail has become an important electioneering way for presidential campaign.Meanwhile,interpersonal function has been widely applied to advertising discourse,political speech discourse,news discourse and so on.Therefore,this thesis will use Democratic Party campaign team's 220 e-mails as the object of study,employ interpersonal function as the theoretical basis,use qualitative and quantitative approaches,and study how to realize the persuasive function through interpersonal function in Democratic Party campaign team's e-mails.Through systematic analysis,the major findings are summarized as follows.Firstly,in mood system,since the main function of declaratives is to give information and the main purpose of e-mails is to let readers know what happened these days,declarative clauses are largely used in these e-mails.Imperatives and interrogatives are also of indispensable significance.Secondly,in modality system,the frequency of modulation is higher than modalization.Moreover,the writers largely employ median value words to express his or her ideas or judgment in order to improve credibility and certainty.Thirdly,the first personal pronoun takes the largest proportion in all personal pronouns,and “We” is largely used in these e-mails.Especially,the inclusive “We” can not only make the relationship between the writer and the reader closer,but also create a sense of solidarity.Fourthly,Aristotle's three persuasive appeals: logos,ethos,pathos help to analyze the realization of these e-mails' persuasiveness.Through analyzing these e-mails,it is obvious that pathos is largely employed.And interrogative clauses and personal pronouns are very important ways to arouse readers' emotion and then realize the persuasion.It is hoped that this thesis will extend the application of interpersonal function in the discourse analysis and provide certain reference for reading persuasive political discourses or writing persuasive political discourses.