Functional Stylistic Analysis Of American Presidential Inaugural Addresses

Style has been a hot issue of much debate, mainly concerning the relationship between form and meaning, the methodologies and the factors which have an influence on style. All these are properly solved by Halliday's stylistic theories. He has put forward style as"meaning potential"or"motivated prominence", expounding on the nature and goals of style from the functional perspective.This thesis is a tentative endeavor to put the genre analysis theory into practice, and carries out an analysis of some American presidential inaugural addresses within the framework of three metafunctions established by Halliday.There are five chapters in this thesis.Chapter one functions as the introduction of this thesis, including the aims and methodology.Chapter two is the theoretical framework of this thesis, which gives an overview of the history of genre and the relationship between genre and register.Chapter three mainly illustrates what presidential inaugural addresses are and the nature of presidential inaugural addresses.Chapter four is the main body of this thesis. The relationship between generic/schematic and genre is analyzed from the perspective of three metafunctions.In transitivity analysis, material processes seem to dominate in these speeches; relational processes take the second position in the proportion of process types. This data can be well explained by the role of setting the political objects and status.In Mood, the high frequency of we embodies the role to shorten the distance between the president and the people. The domination of Simple Present illustrates that the contents of presidential inaugural addresses focus on solving the practical problems. And the modal auxiliary and imperative mood show the language art of presidents'addresses as they are meant to inspire the people.In patterns of thematic progression, because inaugural addresses aim at discoursing upon...