An Analysis Of Obama’s Speech At Fudan University Within The Framework Of Register

As an important tool to achieve politician’s political purposes, political speeches have always attracted scholars’attention in many fields. Successful speeches can effectively publicize the information that speaker wants to convey, and persuade the audience to take certain actions, but how to make these happen? Well-directed selected theme, careful examination of the target audience, and good delivery of the speech, all of these are the factors that influence the success of the speech. What’s more, they are also the three determinants of register, that is, field, tenor and mode.This thesis adopts Halliday’s register framework, and together with the three corresponding metafunctions, to analyze Obama’s speech at Fudan University. According to the discussion, the features reflected by field are:on lexical level, there are many words that demonstrate the content and purpose of the speech; on grammatical level, transitivity system is mostly reflected by material process, mental and relational processes function in certain ways, while other processes seldom occur. On the aspect of tenor, the first person pronouns show up most frequently in the speech, especially the plural form, the use of which passes Obama’s friendliness so that it may shorten the distance between him and the audience; the mood in this speech is mainly declarative, which provides the audience the information he wants to transmit; the modal operators that Obama uses most are the median modal operators, in order to avoid being too powerful or too weak. The mode of this speech is spoken; the examination of the paralinguistic features show Obama’s concerns on appearance, the use of gesture and the exchange of eye-contact with the audience; the Theme system reflects Obama’s emphasis on some points; the discussion of cohesion proves the fact that the speech is cohesive.This research is useful to grasp the linguistic features of political speeches. Besides, it can do some help for English learners to promote their English appreciation and the teaching and study of public speaking.