Contrastive Analysis Of Metafunctions Of English Speech: From The Perspective Of Functional Grammar

Delivering a speech refers to a real process of social activity in which the addressermakes use of oral language and proper non-oral language to express his own opinions ordescribe a certain fact, and exchange information as well. Different types of speeches willbe affected by various elements and possess different stylistic characteristics.This thesis mainly studies the manifestation characteristics of three metafunctions ofEnglish speeches at the level of lexicon grammar in ten contexts of situation. Comparethese characteristics and find out what are the similarities and differences among them.Why do they exist? How to explain? The aim is to provide valuable theoretical andpractical evidence for teaching stylistic writing.The thesis bases on Halliday's Functional Grammar, adopts the methods ofquantitative analysis and contrastive analysis, and studies the manifestation characteristicsof three metafunctions-ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function-atthe level of lexicon grammar. The research involves transitivity system, mood andmodality system and thematic structure. The researching materials are a hundred speechesof ten contexts of situation selected from the Internet, ten texts of each type, and tencorpora are set up to get useful data. The study indicates:Firstly, though the contexts of situation of speeches being studied are different, theaim is all to lead audience to accept the addresser's opinions. So, considering transitivitysystem, material processes are in the majority in all ten types of speeches, followed byrelational processes and mental processes, while verbal processes, behavioral processesand existential processes are less used.Secondly, at the aspect of mood and modality system, for mood system, the aim ofaddresser in each context of situation is mostly to express his own opinion or describeobjective facts, so declarative mood is used most frequently, while imperative mood andinterrogative mood are less employed. As for modality system, microcosmically, the usageof median modal value is more than low modal value and high modal value, obviously.Macrocosmically, the frequencies of modal verbs used in each type of speeches are very different. And at the aspect of personal pronoun, the frequency of first person pronoun isthe highest, and then is third person singular pronoun and second person pronoun; the lastone is third person plural pronoun.Thirdly, analyzing from thematic structure, the usage of unmarked themes in eachtype of speeches is far surpassed that of marked ones, and there are no obvious differencesbetween the using frequencies of marked themes among ten types of speeches. What'smore, most of the marked themes are Adjuncts, and Complements used as marked themesare relatively less.