Functional Analysis Of Bush's Political Speeches

Mainly based on the theories of Halliday's systemic functional grammar, the thesis uses George W. Bush's political speeches as examples to demonstrate how systemic functional grammar are generally realized in his speeches.Trough a systemic analysis of linguistic elements on different level, the lexical, the syntactical, and the pragmatic, it is found that modal auxiliaries, pronouns, imperative structures and tense shift are the elements usually used in Bush's political speeches.These elements not only possess the general functions of attracting hearers' attention, maintaining the two parts' relationship and aspiring the audience as most public speeches do, but also have the specific functions such as conveying multiple aims and enforcing strong power on the hearers.It is hoped that the study may serve to show how systemic functional grammar are usually realized in Bush's political speeches. Apart from that, it is also intended to be a challenge to traditional studies of speeches, which pay too much attention to the content and beautiful sentence structures of the speeches. It is pointed out that an appropriate choice of the elements of a language, such as pronouns, may help a speaker to deliver a successful speech.