An Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In The State Of The Union Address

According to the American constitution, the President will make an annual report to the Congress at the beginning of the year, which aims to elaborate the political policy. The report is called State of the Union Address (shorten for SUA). The SUA is the administrative program of the American ruling class which explains the situations at home and abroad and policies that the government would adopt.The present paper investigates the realization means of the interpersonal meaning in SUA within the framework of systemic-functional grammar. The study of the interpersonal meaning includes Halliday s conceptual framework, i.e. mood and modality; Martin s appraisal system, which expands Halliday s conceptual framework, as well as the person system. The data studied in this paper are five SUA, which are selected from 2006-2010. We are concerned with how the interpersonal meaning is realized in SUA by analyzing the mood, modality, appraisal system and person system and how the president employs the interpersonal meaning to persuade and get support from the general public. The author studies the mood system from the perspective of mood types and explores how they are realized in SUA. The present study analyzed the modality system from the following three aspects: modality types, orientation and value. We mainly investigate the attitude in the appraisal system, which includes three subsystems: affect, judgment and appreciation. From the distribution of the three subsystems, we can see that judgment and appreciation take a larger proportion than affect. We also explore the distribution of the first person pronoun, the second person pronoun and the third person pronoun. From the analysis, we can conclude that the first person pronoun I and we are adopted more frequently than the second person pronoun you and the third person pronoun they .The present paper conducts an investigation of the interpersonal meaning in SUA within the framework of the systemic-functional grammar. On the one hand, it can help us understand the SUA better; on the other hand, it will contribute to providing references and alternatives for the Chinese-English translation of the Report on the Work of the Government, which will make the English versions be rich in interpersonal meaning as much as the Chinese versions.