Realization Of The Interpersonal Meta-Function In Obama's Victory Speech

When people communicate with others, they not only convey the message, but also establish and maintain appropriate social links. In this sense, language consists of two levels, "content" and "interaction", which exists in every text and utterance. Interpersonal function means that language is used to enable us to participate in communicative acts with other people, to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behavior, to express our own viewpoint on things in the world, and to elicit or change theirs.Many scholars have studied the interpersonal function of language from different angles. In this thesis, the author applies Halliday's Theory of Interpersonal Function and Martin's Appraisal Theory to explore the reasons behind the realizations of interpersonal meaning in Obama's victory speech. According to Halliday, interpersonal meaning is realized by mood, modality and intonation. Mood is a basic resource for speech function. Mood plays a vital role in carrying out the interpersonal function of the clause as exchange in English (Thompson, 1996:41). Modality refers to the area of meaning that lies between yes and no—the intermediate ground between positive and negative (Halliday, 1994:88).Appraisal theory consists of three interacting domains: attitude, engagement and graduation. Attitude is concerned with our feelings, including emotional relations, judgments of behavior and evaluation of things. Engagement deals with sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in discourse. Graduation attends to grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred (J. R. Martin, 2008:2).Barack Obama is the first African American President of the United States. He won a majority of votes. His poll of public opinion was so high that he acquired the largest amount of political donations from voters in the American history of elections. In his election campaign, he used his impressive and vivid speeches to affect the voters' opinions.His victory speech is a very good example of realizing the interpersonal function. If we can find out how Obama does it in this speech, it will help us better understand the background of the speech and its expected results and establish a possible model to construct proper interpersonal discourse.