The Study Of Interpersonal Meaning Of Obama's Presidential Election Campaign Speeches

One of the very important components of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar is metafuntion, which consists of textual meta-function, interpersonal meta-function and ideational meta-function. Interpersonal function refers to the act of establishing and maintaining interpersonal relations as well as imposing impact on others by using language. Previous studies on interpersonal meaning mainly focused at the lexical level, and there were very few studies at the discourse level.Barack Obama, the current President of the U.S.A, attracted much attention and finally won the Presidential election in 2008. His success was mainly due to his eloquence. In his campaign speeches, Obama made good use of the language resources, and established a positive political and social image for himself among the audiences. As a result, his political ambitions could be widely accepted and he also gained the support from all social classes. Since Obama was elected the President his presidential victory address and inaugural address attracted wide interest among researchers. However, studies on his presidential election campaign speeches were quiet limited. When he was delivering his election speeches, Obama had to express his attitude, ideas and proposals; meanwhile, he must consider the politeness principle, so that he could establish an ideal interpersonal relationship with the audiences. Therefore, the interpersonal meaning of his campaign speeches is quiet complicated. That is why it is worthy to study the realization types of the interpersonal meaning and how do they realize the interpersonal meaning of Obama's speeches. The data of the current paper are 12 election speeches of Obama delivered between 28th August, 2008 and 4th November, 2008. By combining Halliday's interpersonal meaning theory and Martin's Appraisal theory, the current paper studied how Obama realize the interpersonal meaning from the aspects of mood, modality, personal pronoun, tense and Martin's Appraisal system.After detailed analysis, the paper came to the conclusions: (1) as for mood, declarative is most frequently used to give information and make statements, imperative especially let-structure to inspire the audiences to take some actions and shorten the distance between Obama and the audiences, and interrogative to make the audience think and take part in the process of Obama's speeches; (2) to avoid being too arrogant and aggressive, when he was expressing his attitude by using modality, Obama mainly employed low and median value finite modal operators; (3) as to personal pronoun, he mainly uses the plural forms of first person to shorten the distance between him and the audiences; (4) as to tense, simple present tense is most often used, so that the intimacy between him and the audiences can be felt.(5) as far as Appraisal system is concerned, Obama often uses evaluative adjectives to show his attitude and preference. Meanwhile, his clever use of adjectives with praise and denigration also differentiate Democratic Party presented by him and Republican Party represented by John McCain.On the one hand, the current study can shed light on how Obama realize interpersonal meaning in order to be supported and trusted by the audiences when he delivers his speeches. On the other hand, this study can help readers to be conscious of these features of election campaign speeches, so that hearers can establish a good relationship with audience when delivering public speeches. In addition, pedagogically, this paper can help university teachers to improve students'ability in writing and reading.