Analysis Of Political Speech Discourse From The Perspective Of Register Theory

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development in discourse analysis, with which various disciplines and approaches including interactional sociolinguistics. pragmatics, the ethnography of communication, and stylistics make it an emergent branch of learning that concerns the actual language use in daily communicative activities. Under such circumstances, as an effective means of communication in social interaction, public speech has aroused attention in the field of discourse analysis because of its well-chosen language and closely-knit organization. When we study the public speech, American President Obama’s political speeches deserve due attention. Although a wide range of researches have focused on his victory speech and inaugural address, there have been his influential speeches on policy, which are Obama’s speech in Shanghai and Obama’s address to the nation on Libya.However, little attention has been paid on the analysis of this type of texts over the past years. With the rise of Systemic Functional Linguistics, the register theory, which is theoretically based on the Systemic Functional Linguistics, provides a good insight into the analysis of the public speech. Therefore, by investigating differences of Obama’s two political speeches in terms of the field, the tenor and the mode of discourse both quantitatively and qualitatively, the present research, within the framework of register theory, is conducted to reveal that the choice of language varies with different context of situations, testing the practicability of the register theory to the analysis of the political speech.By making an analysis in detail, the study indicates that there are differences between Obama’s speech in Shanghai and Obama’s address to the nation on Libya on lexicogrammatical choices, which are strongly influenced by three register variables. There is also correlation between the careful selections of lexicogrammar, text and register variables. However, there are some new findings that make the research significant. The choice of transitivity not only relies on its field, but also on its tenor. Meanwhile, the selections of Mood and Modality, especially the choices of Subject and tense types, not only relate to its tenor, but also to its field. Then, the characterization of Theme and cohesion, especially the choices of topical Theme and lexical cohesion not only depend on its mode, but also on its field.The discussion above well justifies the applicability of register theory to the contrastive study of Obama’s two political speeches. Therefore, this study has the following two implications:One is that the practicability of register theory is useful in making research on other political speech discourses, and the other is that it gives some inspirations for further research within the guideline of register theory.