A Study Of Attitude Resources In Donald Trump’s Twitter: An Appraisal Perspective

With the advent of the new media era,political communication is no longer confined to a single way.At the same time,it is worth noting that the influences of new media on political activities have also increased significantly.As the 45^th president of the United States,Donald Trump is actively engaged in publishing his own political views on various social platforms.It has been reported that his election victory was inseparable from his social media activities,which is an important reason why he was eventually elected.Also,Trump has stated that the new media platform has provided him with a great help,and the social media has played a major part during his presidential campaign.Besides,most of his tweets have drawn much attention from all walks of life.Based on that,this thesis attempts to analyze how the attitude resources are used to express his political views,and how the tweets influence his political communication.Appraisal Theory（AT）,originated in the 1990s,was founded and developed by Australian linguist J.R.Martin and his team.It is a theory that is expanded from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics,which aims to deeply interpret the interpersonal meanings and emotional expressions in the discourses.It concerns with how the appraisal resources are used by the speakers to present opinions,to adopt stances and to expose emotions and so on.AT is composed of three subsystems,namely,attitude,engagement and graduation.The attitude system is the kernel of the appraisal theory.This thesis makes an attempt to analyze the attitude resources in Trump’s Twitter,which aims to investigate the distributive features of the attitudinal items,to summarize the ways of realizing interpersonal meanings and to explore the ideology behind the discourses.The collected data are from November 10,2016（the day after Trump won the election）to May 10,2017,exactly 6 months,in total of 946 tweets.Both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted in this thesis.With the help of the software UAM Corpus Tool,the thesis tries to explore the characteristics and distribution of the attitude resources.The research questions of the study are presented as follows:（1）How are the attitude resources distributed in Trump’s Twitter?（2）How do different kinds of attitude resources perform the speaker’s intentions?（3）What is the ideology embedded in Trump’s Twitter?The findings of the study have shown that judgement resources rank first,next come appreciation resources,and affect resources occupy the least proportion in Trump’s Twitter.Besides,the percentage of positive attitude is slightly higher than the negative one.After a detailed analysis of the data,the author has found that Trump is used to evaluating the people and things according to the social norms,the ethics and his own values,with strong subjective emotion.These attitude resources implicate that Trump insists on“Put America First”as his governing idea so as to maximize the interests of the United States.