A Contrastive Study Of Interpersonal Meanings In Bush’s And Obama’s Counterterrorism Speeches

The event of9/11shocked the whole world. After the event of9/11, many politiciansespecially American politicians strongly condemned the terrorist attacks and deliveredspeeches on counterterrorism. However, speeches made by different presidents at differenthistorical periods tend to manifest some differences. The present research is intended to makea contrastive analysis of the interpersonal meanings in Bush’s and Obama’s counterterrorismspeeches from a systemic-functional perspective.Halliday (1994) holds language performs three meta-functions and interpersonalfunction is one of these three meta-functions. Interpersonal function means that people uselanguage to establish and maintain appropriate social links with each other. Halliday (1994)holds the interpersonal function in communication is not only to realize the speaker’s attitudes,role, status, opinions, intention and judgment but also to influence the hearer’s opinions andactions. According to Halliday, interpersonal meaning is mainly realized by the mood,modality and personal pronoun system. This research is mainly to find out how Bush andObama differ in their use of language resources with regard to mood, modality and personalpronoun system.Through a statistical analysis of frequency and distribution of mood, modality andpersonal pronoun system in Bush’s and Obama’s counterterrorism speeches, it is revealed thatObama’s counterterrorism attitude is stronger and more active than Bush’s. First, both Bushand Obama use lots of declarative mood to give some information about their counterterrorism strategies. However, imperative mood in Obama’s speeches (1.4%) takes uplarger proportion than that in Bush’s speeches (0.2%). Obama adopts a lot of imperative moodespecially “let’s structure” to build a close relationship with listeners, which can make hisspeech more persuasive. Second, both Bush and Obama use a large number of modal verbs torealize their interpersonal meanings and convey their counterterrorism strategies. However,the frequency of modal verbs in Obama’s speeches (520times) is much higher than that inBush’s speeches (430times). Third, the personal pronouns “we/us/our” is far greater inObama’s speeches (1303times) than that in Bush’s speeches (771times), and “I/me/my” inObama’s speeches (384times) is higher than that in Bush’s speeches (342times), whichreflects that Obama’s counterterrorism attitude is stronger.As for counterterrorism strategy, both Bush and Obama deliver that all American shouldtry their best to fight against terrorists, but Bush decides to fight a war in Iraq to eliminateterrorism while Obama decides to work with other countries, close the GTMO (Guantanamo)and use lots of drone strikes to wipe out terrorists. In other words, Obama’s counterterrorismstrategy is not to start the war on terror, but to carry out the international cooperation to fightagainst terrorism.