A Systemic Functional Analysis Of English Public Speaking

Systemic Functional Grammar, originated from M. A. K. Halliday, has been widely discussed by linguistic scholars since the latter half of twenty century. The research of Systemic Functional Grammar surpasses other foreign linguistic schools not only in the number of researches but also in the scope and depth of the study. Dozens of research have been made applying this theory into discourse analysis, for example the advertising language, the court language, etc. Systemic functional analysis of English public speaking is a relatively new trial in various kinds of discourse analysis.This paper, based on the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Grammar, carries a pragmatic study of English public speaking on the use of three construing functions: the ideational function, the interpersonal functional and the textual function. The overall purpose is to find out the characteristic of each functional element in English public speaking, identify the similarities and differences between informative speaking and persuasive speaking, and finally establish an effective way that determines the makeup of different types of speech texts.In order to make an objective study, six public speaking have been chosen as the corpus for this study. The corpus consists of two types: informative speaking and persuasive speaking—3 pieces from each. In the process of analysis, an introduction to the English public speaking is firstly given. It covers the definition, the classification and previous research on this particular text. And an elaborate review of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar follows behind. The main part of the paper examines the use of Systemic Functional Grammar in both informative...