Transitivity Analysis Of Franklin D. Roosevelt And Barack Obama's Inaugural Addresses

Ever since Halliday has broken the traditional concept of transitivity and explained the transitivity on the semantic level, the transitivity theory and its application have attracted the attention of more and more linguistic scholars both abroad and in China. This paper employs the transitivity theory in Halliday's Systemic-Functional Linguistics to analyze the inaugural addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama. Through the analysis of the distributions of the different processes and main participants, this paper tries to analyze the inaugural addresses of the two presidents who have taken office during the period of economic crises and find both the similarities and differences in these two aspects. The paper will give a quantitative analysis of the six processes in the transitivity system:material process, relational process, mental process, verbal process, behavioral process and existential process as well as the quantitative analysis of the main participants of the six processes.Through the quantitative analysis, the paper tries to find the similarities and the differences in these two factors. Specifically, this paper tries to find the answers for the next two questions: First, what are the distributions of six processes and main participants; are there any similarities and differences or some rules in the distribution? Second, what are the reasons of such distributions, and what are the functions of the distributions of different processes and main participants in helping the presidents to convey their intentions? The main part of the paper is divided into four chapters:The introduction part shows the importance as well as the aim of the research.In the first chapter, the research on transitivity system including both the theory and the application, and the research on inaugural addresses will be summarized.The second chapter talks about the theoretical background on which this paper based—Halliday's Systemic-Functional Linguistics. According to Halliday, the discourses have mainly three functions:the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the textural function. This paper will give a brief introduction of the three main functions and will focus on the transitivity system in the ideational function. The construction, features and meaning of each process will be made clear.The third chapter discusses the research methodology, including a brief introduction of the inaugural addresses that have been chosen, the reasons of choosing the discourses, the methods of the research and the description of the research results. The research methods used in the paper are both quantitative method and qualitative method. Firstly, the numbers of all processes and main participants will be counted in the two inaugural addresses. Secondly, the proportions will be calculated, so that the distribution of each process and each main participant will be got. Then the author does a qualitative study on the similarities and differences of the distributions and tries to seek the reasons. Moreover, the author tries to make clear the functions of such distributions.The fourth chapter is the most important part of the paper, which focuses on the analysis and discussion of the data and statistics. In this chapter, the general distributions of the six processes, the similarities and differences of the objects that are mainly described by each process as well as the distribution of each main participant will be analyzed.Through the analysis, the author finds that the general distributions of different processes are similar in both inaugural addresses, which indicates that in a period of the economic crisis, the main intentions of both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama are similar too, which is to renew the economy of America. There are some differences in the main objects described by each process. For example, in Barack Obama's inaugural address, there are many material processes used to describe the ancestors of the Americans, but the phenomenon does not appear in Franklin D. Roosevelt's inaugural address. These differences are mainly because of the different historical backgrounds and the special intentions of the two presidents. Besides, the distributions of the main participants in the two inaugural addresses are similar; the differences can be reasonably explained through connecting with the different backgrounds and the different intentions. In the last part of this chapter, some implications will be got.The conclusion part shows a summary of the main research findings and the limitations of the research as well as the suggestions for improvement.