The Interpersonal Function Of Public Speaking English

Public speaking, as a language variety, dates back to period of ancient Greece. Public Speaking plays an important role in domains of science, law and politics and even in daily life. Public speaking, as an art of language, has drawn scholars'attention for a long time. And studies into public speaking are being more and more.In this thesis the author chooses Obama's victory speech and Martin Luther King Jr. famous speech"I have a dream"as studying corpus and Halliday's functional theory as theoretical foundation makes the analysis of in interpersonal meta function in the English Public speaking from aspects of mood, modality and personal pronoun. Aiming to know how interpersonal function is realized in public speaking. Functional Theory has proved applicable to the study of a wide range of areas including literature, poems, law and science etc. It turns out to be a very effective discourse analysis tool.Through studying Obama's victory speech and Martin Luther King Jr. famous speech"I have a dream", findings are: Firstly, declaratives mood type takes the largest proportion, indicating that the first purpose of public speaking is the transformation of information. The other purposes of public speech, persuasion and motivation, made the imperative and interrogative mood types conspicuous. Imperatives appeal to the audiences and motivate them to action; interrogatives provide the chance of interaction between speaker and the audience. Secondly, personal pronouns also have the function of realizing interpersonal meaning. In the two speeches, the first person plural form is used most frequently, the use of the first person plural form can draw close the distance between the speaker and the audience, and make it easy for the acceptance of the speakers'opinion. Thirdly, through the study of modal operators, it is found that median value modal operators are used most. That indicates that the speaker does not want to give the feeling of imposing his ideas, opinions or attitudes on the audience. And high value modal operators are used to express high degree of certainty or determination, and low value modal operators to express the speaker's mild tone.