Author(s)

Wenxiu Song

Faculty of Foreign Languages, Southwest University of Political Science & Law, Chongqing, China.

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.

Political Discourse, Attitude Resources, Adaptation Theory, State of the Union Address

Song, W. (2019) An Adaptation-Based Study on Attitude Resources in Political Discourse—A Case Study of President Trump’s State of the Union Address in 2018. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 7, 288-296. doi: 10.4236/jss.2019.77025.