A Comparative Study of the Political Discourse from the Perspective of Appraisal Theory — Based on the Corpus Data of the Two Presidents’ Inaugural Addresses

Abstract

Based on the corpus data of the inaugural speeches respectively made by the U.S. 45th President Trump and the U.S. 44th President Obama, the study marks the evaluation resources in their inaugural speeches from the perspective of Appraisal Theory by means of employing corpus 3.0 as the auxiliary tool. The paper is going to discover in the inaugural speech, how can the speaker communicate his ideas on the country-running and the national planning to the U.S. masses and how to make full use of attitude resources, graduation system and engagement method to realize his political intentions to the maximum. The paper finds there is a joint factor shared by the two discourses, that is, the graduation system occupies a dominant position, and followed by attitude resources and engagement method in proportion to the evaluation resources. Additionally, the difference between the speakers' political party, subjective consciousness and speaking style will also lead to the variations in the evaluation resources.