I Accept Your Nomination for President of the United States , Tracking Attitudinal Evaluation of Acceptance Speeches Delivered by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump

Appraisal is one of three major discourse semantic resources construing interpersonal meaning that is regionalized as three interacting domains –‘attitude’, ‘engagement’ and ‘graduation’ (Martin White, 2005).This paper focuses on attitudinal analysis of the 2016 presidential acceptance speeches made by the Democrat nominee, Hillary Clinton, and the Republican nominee, Donald Trump. The theoretical framework adopted in this study is based on the appraisal framework developed by Martin White (2005), with a bottom-up analysis on inscribed attitudinal lexis adopted by the two candidates. The results revealed that candidates tendency towards using attitudinal strategies varied to some extent. Trump s higher use of judgment and affect markers showed that he inclined to gain approval by evoking emotional aspect of voters. Clinton, on the other hand, utilized the three markers almost in a similar way to stance her position by highlighting emotional, as well as, economical challenges. Studying graduation, in addition, showed that Trump tended to boost more and show more confidence in his words, while Clinton was more cautious in delivering her speech.