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A Contrastive Study of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign Speeches and Concession Speech Based on Appraisal Theory

Author: MaYaLi
Tutor: LiuYi
School: Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: appraisal theory Hillary·Clinton campaign speeches concession speech
CLC: H311.9
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 67
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Abstract

The appraisal theory, first proposed by James Martin in 1900s, is a further development of interpersonal meaning in systematic functional linguistics. This theory mainly deals with the evaluating resources in texts. It focuses on the various ways in which people use language to express their attitude, evaluation, stance, and meanwhile, establish a personal relationship or strengthen ties with the audiences or readers. Appraisal theory covers three sub-systems: attitude, engagement and graduation. It is frequently employed to study the advertisements, short stories and translation and so on, but few studies of political speeches are carried out under this theory.Political speeches are drawing great attention and study all over the world, since they play a significant role in western political life. The speeches made by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 67th Secretary of State of the United States, is also worthy of our study.In this thesis, the author applied the theoretical framework of appraisal theory to conduct a contrastive analysis of three of Hillary Clinton’s campaign speeches and her concession speech. This thesis aims to explore how Hillary expresses her evaluation, adopts her stances and justifies her positions through the employment of appraisal resources during the speeches in different occasions, to find out the similarities and differences of distributions of appraisal resources and to investigate the factors leading to these results, meanwhile to reveal Hillary’s attitudinal meaning and her hidden ideology.Through the analysis, the author got the following findings. Firstly, Hillary used rich appraisal resources in both of her campaign speeches and concession speech. By employing different kinds of appraisal resources, Hillary chose flexible ways to express her feelings, attitudes, stances and beliefs in different situations. Second, there were more similarities than differences in the distributions of appraisal resources, which was related with the social background and political situation at that time. Besides, the research revealed that Hillary’s attitudinal meaning changed in different occasions, and she couldn’t disguise her sad, depressed and dissatisfactory feeling after failing the campaign even though she tried to use many positive resources. She was more likely to negotiate with the audience in her campaign speech while she showed power and solidarity with the audience. Moreover, Hillary did less work in expressing her strong determination and desire to be the president in the concession speech.This thesis will cast new light on the study of political speeches, especially the same person’s speeches in different situations. Besides, the appraisal resources identified in Hillary’s speeches are worthy of our learning and studying to provide us guidance for composing persuasive speeches.

A Contrastive Study of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign Speeches and Concession Speech Based on Appraisal Theory

Abstract

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