An Analysis Of Appraisal Resources In Concession Addresses By U.S. Presidential Nominees

Functioning to clarify the statesmen's idea and express their political views,political addresses have always been a central concern of discourse analysis.Political addresses,such as campaign addresses,inaugural addresses,farewell addresses and victory addresses are much in favor with discourse analysts and many studies have been conducted on them.Nevertheless,the studies on concession addresses are still few and far between.As a matter of fact,concession addresses are an integral part of political addresses,whose significance should not be underestimated.They serve as a great political arena in which the defeated graciously acknowledge the loss and congratulate the winners to show their magnanimity.Since the election of United States of America catches attention around the globe,the concession addresses by U.S.presidential nominees naturally become hot spots of the world's media.Against this background,the author,under the guidance of Appraisal Theory,carries out an analysis of appraisal resources in concession addresses by U.S.presidential nominees:The present study collects 5 U.S.concession addresses from 2000 to 2016 as the corpus.Firstly,the author manually labels and calculates three appraisal resources,namely Attitude resource,Engagement resource and Graduation resource.Then,the distribution of Attitude,Engagement and Graduation resources is sketched.Lastly,the author adopts qualitative method to analyze some typical examples in the selected addresses.The following findings are observed from the present study:1.In concession addresses,failed U.S.presidential nominees are inclined to deploy many an appraisal resource to convey interpersonal meaning in concession addresses in which attitude resources account for the largest percentage,engagement resources rank second,and the graduation resources are the least.2.Within the Attitude system,more Appreciation resources(38.70%)and Judgment resources(35.63%)than Affect resources(25.67%);within the Engagementsystem,Dialogic Contraction resources(60.09%)are more than Dialogic Expansion resources(39.91%);within the Graduation system,Force resources(98.01%)far exceed Focus(1.99%)resources.3.Failed U.S.presidential nominees use different appraisal resources to forge solidarity with the audience.