Comparative Analysis Of Obama’s Inaugural Address And His Speech In Shanghai Science And Technology Museum In Systemic Functional Grammar

Speech plays more and more important role in current international communication, as a communicating way. Political speech is the speech by which the speaker shows his stand and views, disseminates his thoughts about the political affairs at home or abroad, or about the foreign relationships. A new perspective and method of analyzing text are provided by Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar. So many things in the political speech can be realized by applying the three meta-functions, such as the speaker’s mastery of his objective and subjective attitude, the creation of the credibility and persuasiveness. All are realized by applying these language functions, as well as the construction of his social status, interpersonal relationship and the ideology and so on.This thesis analyzed the meta-functions of language in Obama’s inaugural speech and his speech in Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. With the three meta-functions as the theoretical framework, the author analyzed these two speeches of Obama from the aspect of ideal meta-function, interpersonal meta-function and the textual meta-function. The author studied the speeches by analyzing the transitivity distribution, mood, modality, the choice of personal pronoun and theme. By the analysis the author intended to explore how Obama achieves his intentions in the speech through the choice of words and grammatical structure, especially in different situations with different background and audience. And by comparison of these two speeches, which happened in different context with the same speaker, the author studied how to make proper use of three meta-functions in different public political speeches to achieve the speaker’s different political intentions. This thesis verified the practical applications and maneuverability of the systemic functional grammar in text analysis and made a concrete analysis of the relation between linguistic characteristics and language function in political speech.