A Corpus-based Analysis Of The Interpersonal Meaning Of Barack Obama's Presidential Speeches

Interpersonal Metafunction is a term drawn from M.A.K. Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar. As one of the three Metafunctions, the Interpersonal Metafunction isto help the speaker or the writer to establish and maintain some social relationship and toattempt to impact or change the hearer's or the reader's attitude or behavior. TheInterpersonal Metafunction can be realized through the Mood system, the Modality systemand the TONE system.Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), a branch of instrumental linguistics, emphasizesabout its theoretical foundation—Systemic-Functional Grammar. Throughout thedevelopment of CDA at home and abroad, it is seen that its development at home is slowerand the published articles about the oral discourses are not so many. Therefore, this paperwill choose the oral discourses as data to make a critical discourse analysis.The44th President of the United States Barack Obama was inaugurated On January20,2009. The first African-American President influences the Americans through hisimpassioned and ambitious speeches. This paper will analyze160speeches publishedduring the Obama's2008U.S. Presidential campaign based on the Systemic-FunctionalGrammar combined with the CDA and Corpus Linguistics. And on account of quantitativeand qualitative analysis this paper will make a detailed analysis about the Mood systemand the Modality system in order to explore and illustrate the form of the Interpersonalengagement in Obama's Presidential speeches.The results prove that the followings points:from the view of the Mood system,Barack Obama according to the different speech occasions at the five campaign stagesselects different Mood type with different functions to introduce himself. The declarativeMood is the main tone, and then the imperative Mood and the interrogative Mood. In thepolitical speeches, the speaker will select the declarative Mood to indicate his/her politicalstatus and attitude; meanwhile, he/she will use the interrogative Mood to emphasize andassert the messages. In addition, the speaker will utilize the imperative Mood to expressorder or request; meanwhile he/she will use the declarative Mood to express the order orrequest indirectly and euphemistically. From the view of the Modality system, the speaker selects the majority of modulation expression to introduce himself/herself. And the medianvalue is the main tone, and then the high value and the low value; the speaker canstrengthen the credibility and persuasion of his/her words by means of the usage of themedian and high value. In addition, the usage frequency of the objective expressions ishigher than one of the subjective expressions. The aim of this paper is to improve people'sawareness when selecting the suitable Mood type or Modality type to express theircommunicative goal and to improve people's critical awareness.