The 2019 State of the Union Address and Stacey Abrams' rebuttal. A deferred dialogic exchange

A favoured communicative opportunity of Donald Trump was the State of the Union Address, which was widely broadcast across the contemporary mediascape, including via YouTube. Traditionally, the SOTU address is followed by a rebuttal speech from a representative of the opposition party, and in 2019 the speaker for the Democrats was Stacey Abrams, the first African American woman to deliver a rebuttal speech. This heteroglossic dialogic confrontation was further amplified by the simultaneous fact-checking of the news media, thus presenting the audience/s with a complex diachronic speech event. Indeed, the rich affordances of our polymedia environment critically engage the cognitive levels of human interaction and information exchange, leading to forms of bounded rationality, such as cognitive heuristics. Against this fluid background, the research purpose of this study is twofold. Firstly, it evaluates the success of presidential rhetoric in the 2019 SOTU address, which aimed at projecting a renovated image of the desired unity of values and goals at a national level. Secondly, it comparatively considers the different qualities of the rhetoric of the SOTU and the rebuttal speech, as well as the media reaction. The analytical foci will be on both speakers' attitudinal positionings by utilising the fine-grained resources of the appraisal framework (White 2015), with insights from Bakhtin's notion of dialogism, on their discursive strategies and topoi, following a broad discourse-historical approach (Reisigl 2017; Wodak 2015), as well as on the pragmatic aspects of such exchanges, which were finalised to gain political consensus.

唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）青睐的传播场景之一是国情咨文（State of the Union Address），该演说会在当代媒体景观（mediascape）中广泛传播，涵盖YouTube平台。按照惯例，国情咨文演讲结束后，反对党代表将发表反驳演说；2019年，民主党方面的发言人为斯泰西·艾布拉姆斯（Stacey Abrams），她是首位发表反驳演说的非裔美国女性。这场兼具杂语性与对话性的对抗，因新闻媒体同步开展的事实核查而进一步强化，为受众呈现出一场复杂的历时性言语事件。诚然，我们所处的多媒介（polymedia）环境所具备的丰富可供性（affordances），深度介入人类互动与信息交换的认知层面，催生了有限理性（bounded rationality）这类认知启发式（cognitive heuristics）的思维模式。在此流变的背景下，本研究的研究目的兼具双重性：其一，评估2019年国情咨文中总统修辞的传播成效，该演说旨在塑造国家层面上价值观与目标达成合意统一的全新形象；其二，对比分析国情咨文与反驳演说的修辞特质，以及媒体的反应。本研究的分析重点将聚焦于两位发言者的态度立场：一方面将借助评价理论（appraisal framework，White 2015）的精细化分析资源，结合巴赫金的对话性（dialogism）理论，依托话语历史分析法（discourse-historical approach，Reisigl 2017; Wodak 2015），探析二者的话语策略与修辞论题（topoi）；另一方面也将关注此类交流的语用层面，此类交流最终旨在达成政治共识。