“Truth, Justice and the American Way": The APPRAISAL SYSTEM of JUDGEMENT in the U.S. House debate on the impeachment of the President, 1998

This paper seeks to investigate the linguistic construction of speaker orientation and subject-positioning in the exceptional US House of Representatives debate which took place on the 18th and 19th December of 1998 and which ended in the impeachment of the President, William Jefferson Clinton. The principal scope of this paper is to probe the text from the circumscribed point of view of its speakers’ evaluations of the President’s impeachable - or not - behaviour with respect to the standard of ‘truth’. The paper works within the descriptive and analytical framework of English known as systemic-functional linguistics (hereafter SFL; Halliday 1994). This model posits lexicogrammar as no less than a theory of human experience, as well as a principle for social action (Halliday 1992: 65). However, as one of the most basic ways in which we use language is to take an attitudinal stance both towards our interlocutors, real and potential, and towards the propositional content of our own and others’ texts, methodologically the study makes special use of the still ongoing modelling of systems for construing evaluation and intersubjectivity in terms of a more delicate semantics and grammatics (Halliday 1996) of evaluative lexis - what are called APPRAISAL SYSTEMS (2000) – and, even more particularly, of the system of JUDGEMENT. Moreover, the specific, if heterogeneous, context of culture of the USA is presumed as the given higher-order semiotic within which this process of text creation takes place (Miller, forthcoming a; forthcoming b) and select aspects of this cultural context are glossed, if not systematically, then at least fittingly. The paper is structured as follows: firstly, in section two I provide further background information on the text, or ‘mini-corpus’ which is being examined, as well as make what are deemed needed considerations regarding the context, but also the intertext, which can be seen to be at work; in section three, I offer a brief overview of appraisal theory and the still ongoing modelling of the Systems within SFL, providing corpus examples. Section four then presents and comments the global patterns of the construal of the system of JUDGEMENT in the debate and also takes a brief look at so-called ‘tokens’ of Judgement as construed in one text segment. Finally, section five is dedicated to tentative parting thoughts on the competing discourses emerging from analysis.