Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Scope of the Study
Interaction is significantly emphasized in cyberpragmatic (Yus, 2011), the attraction of which lies in its mutual manifestness of information insomuch as the rapid development of online platforms. Broadly speaking, interaction could be divided into physical interaction and virtual interaction. Physical interaction happens in the face-to-face communication among a speech community while virtual interaction usually exists in Internet-mediated communication always undergoing online. Today’s evolution of social interactions is leading to interwoven and hybrid interactions of a physical and virtual quality (Yus, 2011), which also indicates the addressers’ virtual identities could be constructed the same as their physical identities by the discursive strategies they applied in Internet.
Physical-virtual interaction could be embodied in blogs, SMS texting, Twitter, instant messaging, social networking sites, interactive websites, email, etc. The thesis narrows the targeted objective on the language use in Trump’s tweets. As the most popular short-message social media, Twitter limits its messages up to 140 words, enabling people share their daily life in real time. With increasingly number of political figures engaging in it, Twitter gradually becomes a tool of official propaganda for publicity. Among these engaged politicians, president Trump is especially notable for his high-profile language style and high frequency of tweeting.
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1.2 Research Purpose and Significance
The thesis intends to gain insight into how engagement resources help to realize intertextuality between Trump’s tweets and attached comments, and the discursive strategies of identity construction in interactive discourse based on interpersonal meaning. It also makes a comprehensive analysis on the relationship between engagement resources and identity construction in interactive discourse from a constructive and discursive perspective. Therefore, it commits to shed some light on the interaction between Trump and his Twitter’s followers via the tools provided by discourse analysis, more specifically, the framework of engagement system of Appraisal theory.
As a result of that, this thesis, initially based on the content analysis of Trump’s tweets, analyzes the distribution of engagement resources, so as to sum up how Trump take advantage of engagement resources to deliver his opinion, and investigate his underlying purpose of tweeting, for instance, he determines to spread which kind of value to his potential addressees. Then, further analysis is made on the corresponding comments of selected Trump’s tweets to explore the dialogism between Trump’s tweets and attached comments, furthermore, the intersubjectivity between Trump’s voice and his addressees’ voice based on engagement system. Meanwhile, it evaluates how Trump has constructed the relationship between addresser and addressees via the use of engagement resources, and investigates the connection between engagement resources and the certain social issues. Lastly, the discursive strategies are discussed on the way that Trump applied to construct his president identity in his tweets and the influence on his identity construction brought by the attached comments based on the attribution of engagement resources both in Trump’s tweets and corresponding comments. A case study of Trump’s tweets on China in the corpus of this research is also added for investigating the specific instance to verify the accuracy of this study, to provide some insightful analysis on their stances towards China.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Previous Studies on Engagement System
Engagement system serves as the main theoretical framework in the present study. Originating from Appraisal theory, the system has been applied into diversified studies to investigate plenty of phenomena in social life. The following part attempts to summarize the relevant studies at home and abroad.
2.1.1 Studies on Engagement System Abroad
Since engagement system was applied into linguistic study abroad initially, there are lots of researches under the guidance of it. It could be concluded that the study domain on engagement system abroad covers education, science, emotion, business, politics, among which studies on education shares the biggest proportion in all these fields.
2.1.1.1 Engagement System from Education Perspective
In terms of education, corpus-assisted analysis is frequently utilized for exploring how engagement system takes effect in writing reports or research articles. For instance, Cassi L. Liardet and Sharyn Black (2019) illustrate “a key feature of academic texts is the heteroglossic interaction that occurs between the writer and the experts he/she references”, which is appropriately the embodiment of intersubjectivity. To explore how writer employs integral author prominent reporting structures to integrate outside experts into their texts, researchers examined the usage of English L1 learners’ reporting verbs and compared it with that of experts under the guidance of the engagement system. They later found that the differences between novice writing learners and experts exist in the classification of the reporting verbs. Experts preferred verbs with more dialogical characteristics to endorse their propositions, while English L1 learners usually chose verbs with more neutral stance to provide no overt indication on the evidence.
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2.2 Previous Studies on Interactive Discourse
Interactive discourse possesses various definition and classification ascribing to the fact that it could root in different fields including education, conversation, gender, journalism, etc. The following part is the detailed introduction of the studies on interactive discourse both at home and abroad.
2.2.1 Studies on Interactive Discourse Abroad
Bulk of researches have been conducted on interactive discourse abroad, however, most of which focus on physical interaction in social life rather than virtual interaction happened online. The following part is the concrete illumination of studies on interactive discourse abroad.
2.2.1.1 Interactive Discourse from Education Perspective
Among all these fields, interactive discourse is most frequently appeared in the studies on education, in which the benefits of interaction for improving comprehension and enhancing communication on behalf of students have been emphasized from the perspective of psycholinguistics.
In the aspect of education, Camiciottoli (2004) emphasized “Interactive discourse structuring is used to guide listeners through on-going speech and has been shown to have a positive effect on academic lecture comprehension, particularly in L2 settings.” To explore the frequency of interactive discourse existed in guest lecturers (both L1 and L2) versus L1 classroom lecturers, corpus methodology was deployed in Belinda’s research, and the results suggested that interactive discourse structuring was more influenced by linguistic/cultural diversity than participant unfamiliarity. In addition, interactive lectures played an important role in improving comprehension and in enhancing communicative competence in the English language for EFL university students taking content lecture courses (Morell, 2004). Teresa’s study mainly focused on the interactive discourse that occurred in lectures for EFL students taking a degree in English studies, in which the results could help enable lecturers to enhance participation in their lectures.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework ................................... 29
3.1 Introduction of Appraisal Theory ..................................... 29
3.1.1 Attitude System ................................... 29
3.1.2 Engagement System ......................... 31
Chapter Four Research Methodology .................................. 39
4.1 Research Questions ............................. 39
4.2 Research Design ................................. 40
Chapter Five Results and Discussions ................................... 43
5.1 Analysis of Engagement Resources in Trump’s Tweets ..................................... 43
5.1.1 Distribution of Engagement Resources .................... 44
5.1.2 Strategies to Form Alliance .......................... 54
Chapter Five Results and Discussions
5.1 Analysis of Engagement Resources in Trump’s Tweets
As a new genre to communicate with potential audiences, Twitter discourse is rather rich in appraisal resources, among which engagement resources take up a prominent proportion especially. Applied into seeking for the attention from any possible audiences, engagement resources are utilized in Trump’s tweets even without the notice of Trump himself. Different from attitudinal resources which could be arranged on purpose in Trump’s tweets, the appearance of engagement resources is more natural. As a result, the analysis on the attribution of engagement resources in Trump’s tweets is of high value to find out the real intention beneath his Twitter discourse. The concrete investigation is made from two aspects including the strategies for audience alliance and identity construction in the following part.
5.1.1 Distribution of Engagement Resources
As aforementioned, engagement resources in the light of Appraisal theory contain two aspects including monogloss and heterogloss. Both of these two broad categories are numbered and the figures for the detailed classifications are also presented. In addition, content analysis for explaining the concrete attribution of engagement resources is applied as well. After annotating the collected corpus of Trump’s tweets, the attribution of engagement resources of his tweets is revealed in Table 5-1.
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Chapter Six Conclusion
6.1 Major Findings
Initially, it is found that the distribution of engagement resources in Trump’s tweets could form discourse strategies for constructing president identity and aligning putative audiences. In terms of identity construction of president, several discourse strategies according to the distribution of engagement resources in Trump’s tweets have been summarized, including 4 kinds at least. Specifically, they are consisted of referencing external voices via projections to make Trump’s tweets more convincible, expressing president’s stance via Entertain resources to indicate Trump’s online existence as real human, dominating the power of president via deny resources, and mentioning Chinese issues via monoglosses to show his skills to cope with international issues. In the light of those, a mighty and powerful president identity with significant capability is managed to construct successfully. Moreover, the collocation of engagement resources with different kinds of personal pronouns are functional in aligning Trump’s potential voters. To be more specific, the collocation of the first plural personal pronoun we with various engagement resources could play a pivotal role in forming alliance. We in Trump’s tweets is mainly denote the social group containing his audiences and his government in most occasions, so that to show the stance of standing with American. In addition to those have been mentioned, the roles played by heteroglosses and monoglosses in Trump’s tweets also possessed lots of differences. Heteroglosses are usually applied into tweets to open up the dialogue space for negotiation, while monoglosses are usually leveraged into tweets with some uncertainties. In line with this, though the uncertainties are existed, they could be avoided since these tweets were all from Trump, who is the main news broadcaster of himself via the use of monogloss.
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