An Adaptation-Based Study on Attitude Resources in Political Discourse—A Case Study of President Trump’s State of the Union Address in 2018

Abstract

Based on attitude system of appraisal theory as well as adaptation theory, this paper takes the State of the Union Address delivered by President Trump in 2018 as an example to study attitude resources in American political discourse and explores the communicative context adaptation mechanism behind such uses of attitude resources. It is found that a large number of attitude resources are distributed in American political discourse, among which appreciation resources are employed most frequently, followed by judgment resources and affect is the least-used resource, which is the result of President Trump's choice of language to adapt to his social role and mental motivation, psychology of the audience and readers, spatial features of US Capitol and so forth.

Attitude System Realization of News Texts in Light of Appraisal Theory

“…Contrary to the mentioned hypothesis, this study marked affect as the most frequent sub-category in the delivered speech, followed by resources of judgment and appreciation. The result of the current research is not in line with the study conducted by Song (2019), representing abundant use of attitudinal resources in American political discourse, among which appreciation was the most frequently used resources followed by judgment and affect as the least-used ones, respectively. Likewise, the findings of a study carried out by Lian (2018) do not conform to the present research in that appreciation resources prevail the largest share, followed by affect and judgment.…”

“…Likewise, under the resources of appreciation, the positive resources prevailed with 87.9%, while the negative ones occupied 12.1%. Song (2019) similarly studied attitude resources in American political discourse. The findings represented the abundant use of attitudinal resources in the delivered text, among which appreciation was the most frequently employed, followed by judgment and affect, respectively.…”

An Adaptation-Based Study on Attitude Resources in Political Discourse—A Case Study of President Trump’s State of the Union Address in 2018

“…The former adjusts the volume of the gradable attitude resources while the latter deals with the volume of ungradable resources. As the core of appraisal theory, [9] as a means used to express human feelings, judge behavior and evaluate the value of things, and thus three kinds of appraisal subcategories of attitude have been formed: affect, judgment and appreciation. This paper primarily focuses on the attitude system of appraisal theory.…”

Trump’s populist discourse and affective politics, or on how to move ‘the People’ through emotion

“…In this paper we draw on Appraisal Theory; to our knowledge, Quam and Ryshina-Pankova (2016), Novi, Fitriati and Sutopo (2019), Song (2019), and Ross and Caldwell (2020) are among the few papers approaching the analysis of Trump's discourse from this perspective. Their focus, however, is not on EMOTION but on OPINION-JUDGEMENT, OPINION-APPRECIATION and ENGAGE-MENT.…”