Stylistic Properties Of U.S. Presidents' Inaugural Addresses-Analyzed On Halliday's Metafunction Theory

American Presidents' Inaugural Addresses, a sub-component of Political Speaking, are publicly delivered by the newly-elected president on Inauguration Day to the whole country and world. In the addresses, he lays out his administrative creeds and persuades the public to accept and support his ideas. As a unique and practical variety, the addresses are really significant. Studies on the discourse can not only help readers further understand the meaning, better appreciate the essence of the English language, but also broaden the scope of English Public Speaking analysis. What's more, it facilitates the improvement of the speech lovers' skills in using public speaking language and promotes the teaching of English comprehension and writing in colleges.The stylistic studies before are usually performed in a qualitative way, by summarizing and describing the phonetic, lexical, syntactic, textual and rhetoric characteristics. Differently, Functional Stylistics, advocated by Halliday and others, emphasizes the relationship between a discourse and the context of situation and motivates the stylistic studies from outside the text. This thesis is based on the theories of metafuntion and context of situation in Functional Stylistics and presents the stylistic properties of U.S. Presidents' Inaugural Addresses by studying the realization of the ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction at the level of lexicon and grammar in a quantitative way and following an "Analysis—Interpretation—Evaluation" procedure. In order to reflect the features of modern English, the latest ten American Presidents' Inaugural Addresses are chosen as corpus of study. One of the most prominent characteristic of the thesis is the systemic studies on the basis of concrete statistics. The results of the studies are as follows:Firstly, transitivity, metaphor of transitivity and voice are analyzed as respects the realization of the ideational metafunction. Analysis shows that material process is used the most and followed by relational and mental processes. In material process, the verbs are mostly transitive and meanwhile, a lot of Empty Verbs are used; Actor is mainly played by the first person pronoun and noun phrase; most of Goal is realized by noun phrase and then pronoun and infinitive. Between the two types of relational processes, the attributive one is chosen more than the identifying. The great amount of use of metaphor of transitivity is also an obvious feature in the addresses. Nominalization, as the most typical one, makes the addresses characteristic of the written text. Voice analysis indicates that active voice ranks top and is followed by middle voice. Passive voice appears the least.Secondly, tense, mood, modality and the metaphorical expression in mood and modality are studied regarding to the lexical and grammatical realization of the interpersonal metafunction. In the addresses, simple present tense is used most frequently; simple future ranks second and then is followed by present perfect and simple past, the last three showing with nearly equal frequency. Mood analysis shows that declarative mood is employed at the highest rate. Interrogative mood and imperative mood account for a very small percentage. In all imperative sentences, the pattern of "Let's/Let us" appears with an average proportion of more than 70%. Modal verbs are the primary means to express the addressers' mood. Modal adverbs and the extended predicate are not used very often. In all the modal verbs, the modal verbs with a strong mood are more than those with median and soft mood. So, the degree of politeness is relatively low in the addresses.Lastly, thematic structure and cohesion are studied as regards the realization of the textual metafunction. Theme analysis shows that unmarked theme accounts for more than marked theme, of which the adverbial in theme place is employed with the highest frequency and then the object, predicative and complement follow it. In the various thematic progression patterns, parallel progression is used most and then linear appears more than the rest. Cohesion studies indicate that the various cohesive devices are mixedly employed in the addresses.