A Functional Stylistic Analysis Of Trump’s Inaugural Address

Functional stylistics was first proposed in 1971 based on Halliday’s SystematicFunctional Grammar.Compared with traditional stylistics,functional stylistics puts forward a theoretical model and analytical framework for discourse analysis by means of a linguistic approach.Systemic Functional Linguistics emphasizes the sociality of language.Functional stylistics analyzes language from the level of social environment,mainly from perspective of three metafunctions,namely,ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.The purpose of a political speech is to try to persuade the audience to support the speaker’ political ideas and opinions,and even to some extent put them into action.The Presidential inaugural address of United States is an extremely important category of political speeches.Trump is the only U.S.president who has no official background,but he has created history.His inaugural speech also has strong personal characteristics and style.Therefore,it is necessary to study his inaugural address.The author uses qualitative and quantitative methods to study Trump’s Inaugural Address.It aims to reveal how Trump succeeded in making his speech by using three metafunctions.Through our research we find that Trump’s inaugural speech has the following stylistic features: in terms of ideational function,mainly from the perspective of transitivity,the whole speech is based on material processes and relational processes,which makes the speech more objective and persuasive.In terms of interpersonal function,the extensive use of declarative sentences indicates that this speech is mainly about presenting facts and opinions;Trump’s frequent use of median modal verbs is designed to show American people his determination to fight for a better future for American people;The use of the first person plural narrows the distance between the audience and the president,which makes the president’s political views and opinions more easily accepted.In terms of textual function,large use of unmarked themes makes it easier for listeners to understand the speaker’s true intentions.Trump uses different cohesive devices to make the whole text smooth and coherent.In addition,Trump’s non-politician speech was also one of the reasons for his success.The research of this paper has the following significance.Firstly,to a certain extent,this study can help readers or listeners better understand the real intention of the speaker.Secondly,this article provides some skills for the preparation of speech draft,meanwhile,it is beneficial to the improvement of Chinese English learners’ writing ability.Thirdly,taking the function of language as the starting point,this paper discusses the stylistic means used to achieve these functions,and it verifies the practicability and operability of systemic functional linguistics in analyzing speech discourse.