Textual Cohesion And Coherence Of Obama's Speeches

Halliday's systemic functional grammar provides theory for the text or discourse analysis. It has been proved that this theory can be applied in many fields. Textual coherence is mainly realized in two aspects:micro level and macro level. This thesis discusses mainly the micro level. Micro coherence is manifested in various cohesive semantic relations on lexico-grammatical and clausal levels. These cohesive relations are co-constructed by means of the three textual components:cohesive devices, thematic structure and information structure. Based on this coherence framework, a detailed analysis of Obama's four speeches is carried out. As a result, the researcher discovers what binds a speech together as a unified whole and how it is bound together. The detailed analysis shows that the reference, ellipsis, conjunction, lexical cohesion are major cohesive devices in the speech text. The great amount of parallelism is the characteristic of the speeches which determines that the primary pattern of thematic progression in this thesis is theme iteration. Lastly, our attempt of information structure analysis proves that the speech basically conform to the information flow of Given→New→Given→New model.The results of the detailed analysis demonstrate that Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics is feasible in explaining the textual coherence of political speeches. The findings provide some valuable implications for speech writers to produce coherent speeches. They help English learners better comprehend other English speeches. Furthermore, they will improve their writing competence with the awareness of coherence mechanism.