On The Application Of Functional Grammar In Inspirational Speeches

Under the highly competitive background, the speaking skill is paid more and moreattention. And the language skill and art of speech----as a speaking artistic form----is beingpaid more and more attention, besides this paper. By observation, according to the function ofspeech, most of the speeches are mainly divided into two styles: Knowledgeable speech andInspirational speech. Knowledgeable speech, evidently, aims to interpret some kinds ofknowledge, mainly the engineering knowledge; Inspirational speech is to inspire people or thelisteners to live a life and handle the problem positively. And the Inspirational speech intereststhe author’s attention. The realization of inspiration lies to its choice of language and othersspeaking techniques. However, the language is the research objective of the paper. Therefore,the speech language is the focus of the paper. In order to explore the Inspirational speakinglanguage function, the author makes use of the linguist Halliday’s Functional Grammar theorywhich is about the analysis of the language function.This paper aims to explore the Inspirational speaking language features and functionsbased on the Halliday’s Functional Grammar theory. Its theoretical meaning is to furtheranalyze the Functional Grammar’s application in functional texts based on the formers’theoretical research; to make a further interpretation on the Functional Grammar theory byanalyzing some speech texts. This paper takes advantage of the Functional Grammar theory toanalyze the speech language features and functions, which deepens the research of the speechlanguage and enlarges the research range on the Systemic-Functional Grammar theory. Inpractice, by the research of the topic, this paper tries to reveal the inspirational speakinglanguage features and functions, which will be benefit for people to know and understand thespeech features and the objective of the speaking activity; on the other hand, it will also beuseful for people to master the speaking language features exactly and learn its application ofthe language skills and methods so as to make the effective personal communication in life,learning and working, to improve the efficiency, to adapt to the society and to serve thesociety and people.This research is based on the three Meta-functions theory in Halliday’s Functional Grammar theory. In addition, due to the speech background and its situation’s influence on theinspiration effect, this paper also takes advantage of Halliday’s Situational Context theoryunder the Context theory to analyze the speech texts and makes the theory as one of thetheoretical bases. This paper applies to the combination of Quantitative analysis andQualitative analysis as research methods to make the research. Firstly,30inspirationalspeeches will be chosen according to the understanding of “Inspirational” among a largenumber of inspirational speeches. Then, under the help of WORD’s searching function, thecommonality of texts language will be accumulated; then, the typical language features willbe found out and concluded, classified, analyzed and made tables, realizing the quantitativeanalysis. Further, this paper will extract the typical clauses to analyze and demonstrate so asto realize the qualitative analysis.By research, in the inspirational speech, most of speakers apply the Ideational function toexpress the objective facts so as to invoke the listeners’ resonance, and then the Interpersonalfunction to express personal experience or experiences or through the personal influence tospeak his or her own thought or view in order to affect others and inspire others. To thePersonal Pronouns, most of the inspirational speeches are to inspire others, not including thespeaker himself or herself, so the choice of the Second Person is the best; supposing thateverybody, the speaker included, encounters some common difficulty, the choice of the FirstPerson, at this moment, is a wise action, which signifies that the speaker is a friend of thelisteners, not just an onlooker.Surely, the research also has some shortages. For example, the choice of speaking textstends to the political inspirational speeches. Actually, the texts chosen can still be classifiedinto other kinds; there are also other language features is valuable to focus and explore inthose texts; limited the theoretical basement, time, spirit and the author’s competence level.This paper can not analyze the inspirational speaking language features and functions in moredetail. The author hopes the more capable brains, who aspire to the kind of research, can makethe further speech classification and utilize other suitable language theories to deepen theexploration of the inspirational speech.