politicians adopt a variety of linguistic strategies in their speeches to connect with their audience. to name one, appraisal, as a system of interpersonal meaning, is concerned with evaluation where resources are used for negotiating social relationships. despite their significance in shaping texts, there have hardly been any extensive inventories of appraisal tools contrasting electoral speec...

What can we learn about presidential candidates by examining their speech in natural conversation? In the present study, the television interviews from the 2004 Democratic presidential primary campaign of John Kerry (N = 29) and John Edwards (N = 34) were examined using linguistic analyses. Results indicate that Kerry and Edwards were similar in their use of positive emotion words, but that Ker...