A Contrastive Study Of Interpersonal Function In Chinese And English Political Speeches

Interpersonal function, as one of the most important parts of Halliday’s systemicfunctional grammar, reflects the tone in text. It is realized by mood, modality and personsystems. Interpersonal function focuses on the relationship between the writer and the readerof text and on how the speaker puts forward his opinions and attitudes to influence thelisteners’ attitudes and behaviors. Languages from different cultural and social backgroundshave various ways to realize interpersonal function.Political speeches, often delivered by a national leader or a representative of a party inpublic, show the standpoints and opinions of a country on national and international events.Delivering political speeches is an important tool for parties to publicize or to propagate theirpolicies and build their national images on the international stage. Such a speech has its owndistinctive characteristics with clear organization and carefully-chosen words. A study ofChinese and English political speeches from the perspective of interpersonal function willreveal how speakers use languages to achieve their goals, to wield their power, and toestablish interpersonal roles in speeches.This paper has made an attempt to apply interpersonal function into the analysis ofpolitical speeches. For this purpose,10speeches are collected according to4criteria. Thespeeches are delivered by the national leaders from Chinese and American governments onfive different occasions, from education, New Year greeting, economy to internationalrelations. The frequency of mood, modality and person pronouns in these ten speechesreveals the differences in the realization of interpersonal function between Chinese andEnglish political speeches.The research shows that in modality system, the frequency of modal operators in Englishpolitical speech is higher than those of Chinese data, English speakers are prone to show theirdetermination, aims and attitudes in modal operators. and high value of modal operators arepreferred by both Chinese and English speeches. In mood system, the English speech usesthree mood types (i.e. declarative type, interrogative type and imperative type), while Chinese speeches apply only two types (i.e. declarative and imperative). In person system, the numberof pronouns in English speeches is far outweighing those in Chinese speeches. The same caseis shown in the different types of pronouns used in the speeches. Differences in these threeaspects indicate that English speeches employ more devices in the realization of interpersonalfunction.