“Dollars and Nicotine”—Construction Mechanism of Evaluative Meaning in Political Speeches

Abstract

Objectives: Economy and health are the most basic guarantee for a country’s stable development, they are also mandatory themes in every US President’s State of the Union Address. These two issues will directly determine the Congress and people’s evaluation towards the president’s governing capacity. Based on the binary division of explicit and implicit evaluation, taking the economic (employment and tax reform) and health (nicotine and drug addiction) of Trump’s State of the Union Address as data, this study has carried out a comparative analysis on the construction of evaluation meaning, attempting to build the evaluation model. We found that, Trump shows a very strong preference for implicit or indirect evaluation, which includes various graduation resources, infused process of AMOUNT and QUALITY, shared knowledge, specific numerals and verb tense. A closer analysis indicates that, under different themes, different constructing mechanisms have been utilized to form or strengthen the evaluation implication. To be specific: (1) both explicit and implicit resource are applied in constructing the evaluative meaning; (2) at different stages under the same theme, the constructing model shows difference, with the explicit resources being more prominent at the beginning or ending stage. In the body part, both explicit and implicit resources are of prominence, which tend to cooperate with each other, evoking or strengthening the established evaluative meaning. It proves that different types of evaluative resources show different degrees of prominence across stages within same theme.