Interpersonal Meaning In English Public Speeches By Chinese And American University Students

This thesis aims to investigate the public speeches written by Chinese and American university students, with a focus on interpersonal meaning and its linguistic realization based on the theories of Functional Grammar. To address that topic, a comparative approach is employed as general framework for the research work.To begin with, the thesis briefly introduces the Functional Linguistics, and then makes an elaborate documentation of interpretations of the interpersonal meaning and its linguistic realization held by different scholars. As to Poynton, tenor can be characterized by using the three-dimensional model: power, contact and effective involvement. It is embodied by means of formality, encoder's attitude as well as channel of interaction. Halliday argues that interpersonal meaning serves to describe the information exchange between persons. It expresses the speaker's identity, status, attitude, motivation and inference of matters. Li Zhanzi, a famous Chinese scholar, proposes to reframe interpersonal meaning from the epistemic, evaluative and interactional aspects. She endeavors to build a three-element two-level model of interpersonal meaning, including micro society and macro society. Specifically speaking, the interpersonal meaning is realized by means of mood, modality, person system, tense, indirect quote, reflexives and evaluation. To sum up, the author of this thesis proposes the categories of interpersonal meaning for this research paper: mood system, modality, person system and vocatives. After a documentation of interpersonal meaning, the thesis briefly introduces the public speaking in terms of history, definition, classification and features. There are a great quantity of research on public speeches from different perspectives (Trosborg,2000; Corbett and Conners,1999; Carlin and Payne,1995). The focus may be on the genre, the overall structure, or the style. The speeches by university students under investigation are characterized by formal and persuasive, which follow a natural pattern of human thought by gaining audience's attention, demonstrating a problem, offering a solution and then helping them act on the solution.After a documentation of interpersonal meaning and public speaking, a comparison is made to analyze the thirty speeches by Chinese and American university students. The findings indicate that in terms of mood type, American students prefer employing declarative mood to convey indirect command and suggestion. As for modality type, Chinese university students encode more modulation. In terms of modality orientation, the two groups of speakers prefer to use implicit modality, but in the speeches by the Chinese students subjective type is dominant. Regarding person system, the most highly occurred words are "I" and "we" in the speeches by Chinese university students while they are "we" and "you" in the speeches by American university students. Chinese university students use more vocatives in their speeches compared with American university students but the frequency is still low. Therefore, the author of the thesis concludes that Chinese university students establish a teacher-student relationship in the speeches whereas for American university students the relationship between speaker and audience is friend-like. Then the author traces the reasons for the differences. First, the differences may partly due to the influence of writing practices in the Chinese writers' first language. Second, the differences may result from the different audience's expectation in the varied traditional culture in public speaking.The significance of the study is that by analyzing interpersonal meaning, public speakers learn how to meet audience's expectation, and as a result the skill of writing public speeches may be improved. In addition, the research also sheds some light on teaching of English writing.