The Analysis Of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Election Speeches Based On Interpersonal Grammatical Metaphor

Grammatical metaphor,as a unique form of language expression,includes conceptual grammatical metaphor and interpersonal grammatical metaphor.Interpersonal grammatical metaphor is often used by the speakers in political speeches for its function of increasing the accuracy and image visualization.The U.S.presidential election speeches,as the earliest discourse by the future presidents of America,deliver the speaker’s governing ideas and help achieve political goals.Interpersonal grammatical metaphors were largely used in the U.S.presidential election speeches.Therefore,the study of interpersonal grammatical metaphor in the speeches is meaningful,which can help examine the political propositions of the next president and get knowledge of his/her plan for future national development.Based on the theory of interpersonal grammatical metaphor,four speeches are selected as samples in this paper from the those by Hillary Clinton during the two presidential elections in 2008 and 2016,to analyze the interpersonal grammatical metaphor used.Quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are employed to reveal the linguistic characteristics and pragmatic intentions of Hillary Clinton,thus the transformation of her image in the elections.The research has found that:in mood metaphor,declarative mood is widely used in Hillary Clinton’s speeches,which makes Hillary Clinton’s political ideas easily accepted and shortens the distance between Hillary Clinton and the voters.The use of imperative mood reflects the changes of Hillary Clinton’s attitude in the 58^thpresidential election speeches from those in the 57^th.In the two speeches in the 57^thpresidential election,Hillary Clinton tries to use more imperative moods to show her forceful attitude,and portray herself as a strong woman.In 58^thpresidential election speeches,Hillary Clinton uses few imperative moods and turns her attitude into a soft and persuasive one.She portrays herself as an ordinary elder.The use of interrogative mood is to arouse the enthusiasm of the public and interact with the public.Exclamatory mood only appears in the 58^thconcession speech,which reveals Hillary Clinton’s regret for the election results.As for modality metaphor,Hillary Clinton mainly uses more medium-value and low-value modality,and high-value modality in the 58^thpresidential election speeches.By using medium-value modality metaphor,Hillary Clinton’s appears less forceful and better expresses her desire to serve the people than she did in the 57^thpresidential election.On the basis of the existing research in political speeches,this paper focuses on the comparison between the selected speeches by Hillary Clinton in her two presidential elections from the perspective of interpersonal grammatical metaphor,and explores pragmatic intentions and identity changes of Hillary Clinton.The research itself provides some insights into political speech interpretation.