Comparison In Interpersonal Meaning Between Obama’s And Romney’s2012Nomination Speeches

When people communicate with each other, they not only convey the information, butalso establish and maintain appropriate social relations. In this sense, language is made of twolevels,“content” and “interaction”. It exists in every discourse and sentence. Interpersonalfunction means that language is employed to enable us to join in speech acts with other people,to establish relations with them, to influence their behavior, to present our own opinions.This thesis adopts Halliday’s Interpersonal Function Theory and Fairclough’sThree-dimensional Model to make a comparative analysis of Obama’s and Romney’snomination discourses. Firstly the author begins to analyze the description of linguisticcharactristics-mood, modality and personal pronouns system in the two speeches. It focuseson the related three questions that are about the relationship between speech language and theapplicational texts.There are a lot of findings:(1) In the course of speech, both Obama and Romney useddeclarative clauses most times so as to sound more real and objective. Particularly Romneyused “Let structure” to express his plans in order to tell people the changes he is going tobring about. Like this, he can encourage the people to make efforts to change what they canbe in search of a better life. It concerns the speaker and the listeners and makes it seem thatthey stand on the same group.(2) Obama and Romney used the high degree modalities “will”and “can” to show the future policies, to call on people to stand with him. He tried his best torebuild people’s confidence. Obama used “Can” higher than Romney’s. It indicates Obamahas stronger belief in change.(3) The employment of the inclusive “we” by the speakers alsomade them connected with the listeners, for the same aims and interests. Obama used “we”,for135times in his speech, at the same time it narrowed the distance between him and thelisteners, which is sounded intimate. And Romney used88times of the first person singularpronoun “I/my/me”. It indicates the speaker hopes people believe America and solve the problems together under his leadership.This thesis studies the feasibility of revealing the hidden relationship in Obama’s andRomney’s nomination speeches on the basis of Halliday’s and Fairclough’s theoreticalmodels.