A Study Of The Realization Of Interpersonal Function Of American Presidential Inaugural Addresses

Categorized as a political speech and delivered to home and foreign audience byU.S. newly-elected President on Inauguration Day, American presidential inauguraladdress is generally rated as an instrument having wielded far-reaching influence overAmerican society，politics and culture and having played a pivotal role in Americaaffairs and even the world affairs. Through this speech delivery, the new presidentgives full expression of his administrative program and political strategy to thegeneral public. Whether it turns out to be a success or not may either boost or weakenAmerican people’s confidence as well as their support for him and the newgovernment. Thus American presidential inaugural address has been recognized asone of special and important practical writings, and received wider attention from thegeneral public.The Systemic Functional linguists assume that language is a product of humansocial activities; as the means of human communication, language possesses a varietyof functions. Halliday generalizes the functions of language to three kinds, namedmeta-functions, i.e. ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function.Interpersonal function allows the addresser to indicate his status, identity, attitude,intention or his inferences of things, and these can be realized by the use of mood,modality, personal pronoun or tense. This research will use ten presidential inauguraladdresses to be the linguistic data and found out how the presidents achieve thepurpose of the speeches by using the realization means of interpersonal function.The paper is divided into five parts. The first part introduces some basic ideas ofthe American presidential inaugural addresses, including the American presidentialinauguration ceremony and the previous researches on presidential inauguraladdresses. Then the author states the aim and significance of this research and showsthe layout of the thesis. Second part is the literature review. The author introduces theSystemic Functional Grammar firstly and then focuses on the interpersonal functionof the three meta-functions, as well as the studies concerned with this function fromand beyond Systemic-functional perspective. The third part is the theoreticalframework and research methodology. First there is the introduction of the fourrealization means of interpersonal function, and then the author states that theresearch will be done by the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The fourth part is the core of the thesis---the detailed analysis of the realization ofinterpersonal function of the American presidential inaugural addresses. The chosenaddresses will be analyzed from four perspectives, i.e. mood system, modality system,personal pronoun system and tense system, and finally the author can clarify that howthe presidents achieve their purpose of the speech by the using of realization means ofinterpersonal function. In the ending part, the author summarizes the thesis and pointsout the limitations of the paper, and hopes that there will be more fruitful results infuture study.