Functional Stylistic Analysis Of Bush's Weekly Radio Speech

In the recent decades, systemic-functional grammar has drawn much attention in the field of linguistics and it has been employed to analyze wide ranges of texts, including literary and non-literary ones. This thesis is a tentative endeavor to put the genre analysis theory into practice, and carries out an analysis of some of American president George W. Bush's Weekly Radio Speeches within the framework of functional grammar established by M.A.K.Halliday.This thesis firstly introduces the purpose of the present research and the organization of the thesis. Then it generalizes the domestic and foreign studies of political speech. The following states the methodology employed in the present research and the data scope and data resources. After that, Systematic Functional Grammar is generally reviewed. The important concepts (such as transitivity, mood and modality, Theme and Rheme) which are closely related to and serve as the theoretical basis of the present research are introduced in detail. Subsequently, the above notions are discussed and analyzed combined with some of the data collected and figure analysis, showing the methodology and procedure employed by the author, and then the data are analyzed in detail.Then the thesis analyses the three Metafunctions of Bush's Weekly Radio Speech. As for the ideational function, only experiential is discussed with the focus on transitivity and lexical density. Transitivity refers to the system describing clauses. The types of clause process are material process, mental process, relational process, verbal process, behavioral process and existential process, which are classified on the base of their description of activities and properties of events in the world.As for the interpersonal function, the analysis focus is on mood system, modality. Mood system decides the 4 speeches functions of clauses: offer, statement, command, and question. Metaphor of modality disguises the speaker's opinions about the probability containing in their words to lower the possibility of being challenged by others for the validity of their opinions, repetition strengthens the speaker's emotional appeal to their audience.At last, the analysis of textual function discusses cohesion. It focuses on thematic organization and progression in the development of discourse.This thesis shows that the language features are defined by certain context of situation, and it also proves the practicality and applicability of Systematic Functional Grammar in public speech discourse. The findings of present research hold some implications for English teaching and English learning. Besides, the analysis will help people understand how Bush organizes his speech and what information he offers and most importantly the purposes of his speeches.