A Metafunctional Analysis Of Martin Luther King's I Have A Dram

Since Halliday established Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) in 1960s, many functional linguists have been working to apply it in discourse analysis and hence it interests people gradually. This thesis analyses the metafunctions of the famous speech of Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream, to testify that SFG is of notable power of application and manipulation and to provide its readers a better understanding and fuller appreciation of the speech.The thesis introduces briefly the relevant approaches to discourse analysis at present and the past traditional rhetorical and stylistic analysis of I Have a Dream before presenting definitions of discourse, discourse analysis, three metafunctions of SFGThen the thesis analyses the three metafuctions of I Have a Dream in detail. As for the ideational function, only experiential function is discussed with the focus on transitivity and lexical density. Transitivity refers to the system describing clauses. The clause process types are material process, mental process, relational process, verbal process, behavioural process and existential process, which are classified on the base of their description of activities and the properties of events in the world. Lexical density is closely related to nominalization through which processes and properties are reworded metaphorically as nouns; instead of functioning in the clause, as Process or Attribute, they function as Thing in the nominal group.As for the interpersonal function, the analysis focus is on mood system, metaphor of modality and repetition. Mood system decides the 4 speech functions of clauses: offer, statement, command and question. Metaphor of modality disguises the speaker/writer's opinions about the probability containing in their words to lower the possibility of being challenged by others for the validity of their opinions. Repetition strengthens the speaker/writer's emotional appeal to their audience.At last, the analysis of textual function discusses non-structural cohesion and structural cohesion. The former focuses on reference of grammatical cohesive devices and lexical cohesive devices, reiteration and collocation which form cohesive chains. The latter focuses on thematic organisation and progression in the development of discourse and cohesive chains formed by parallelism.