Metafunctional Analysis Of English Political Speeches

Political speech, as a special kind of public speeches, is often made by politicians. It aims to take stands and clarify views on political issues at home and abroad. As an important weapon for political struggles, political speech plays a specific role among all types of public speeches. With their own profound meaning, organized demonstration and elegant description, political speeches represent the crystallized and collective wisdom of political groups and their political views and governance.This thesis, theoretically based on Halliday's systemic functional grammar, takes four political speeches under different historical backgrounds as the samples to analyze the features of political speeches from the perspectives of three metafunctions:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. The scope of the analysis covers Transitivity system, Mood and Modality system, and Thematic structure. It shows the specific features of political speech which is quite different from other kinds of discourses. It also reveals the variance between different political speeches. Through the analysis, we can find out that:Firstly, in political speeches, the speakers aim to describe the objective fact and to persuade the audiences to accept their political viewpoints. So from the perspective of transitivity system, the material processes account for the largest proportion in political speeches; the relational processes and relational processes rank the second place; and behavioral processes and verbal processes are seldom used.Secondly, the speakers'communicating purpose is the publicity of their main thoughts so as to make the audiences do what they want them to do. So the declarative mood is often used in political speeches. Meanwhile, the imperative mood is used sometimes. In addition, the first personal pronoun "we", which is used frequently, reflects the close relationship between the speakers and the audiences.Thirdly, from the perspective of Thematic structure, the marked Theme emphasizes the new information and attracts the audiences'attention. The interactive use of marked Theme and unmarked Theme can not only make the speeches easy to be understood, but also lay stress on key points. So the goal of the speeches can be realized.