Evaluation Mechanism of Political Discourse: A Holistic Approach

Abstract

Taking the economic issue of Trump’s First State of the Union Address (SUA) as original data, the present study examined the evaluation features of political speeches by adopting a holistic approach, which includes both macro and micro dimensions. At the macro level, a series of semantic patterns were identified, with Goal-Achievement and General-Example Patterns being the most prevalent. They predetermine the evaluative tone, giving the surrounding statements evaluative meanings, exhibiting the radiating nature of evaluative meaning; at the micro level, a variety of resources have been identified, both explicit and implicit, lexical and syntactical, attitudinal and gradational, which collaborate to reinforce the subjective evaluation, revealing the holistic characteristic in the realization of evaluative meaning. Throughout the analysis, three evaluative mechanisms have been proposed, which are the coupling of meaning, semantic prosody, and tense switching. They collaborate and promote the subjective evaluation to be established and reinforced in a cumulative, gradient or hybrid pattern. In a narrow sense, the present study has partially revealed Trump’s political discourse feature. Broadly speaking, it contributes to the theoretical development of the appraisal framework by refining existing evaluation systems through a holistic research paradigm, which in turn facilitates accurate interpretation of various types of discourse.