The Realization Of The Interpersonal Function In Obama’s2012Presidential Election Speech

This thesis uses the interpersonal function theory of Halliday to analyze Obama’s2012presidential election speech in Ohio. By selecting and analyzing the mood, themodality and personal pronouns, the author finds out how the interpersonal functionrealizes in the election speech of Obama.The systemic-functional grammar of Halliday contains three funtions: theinterpersonal function, ideational function and textual function. The interpersonalfunction plays an important role in linguistic study.The interpersonal function is to interact with other people to establish andmaintain the appropriate social links with them in order to influence their behaviorand convey their own opinion on things. The interpersonal function is realized in threeaspects: mood, modality and personal pronouns. Through studying the speechdiscourse, the author finds out that Obama employs a large number of mood, modalsand personal pronouns to realize the interpersonal function in order to promote hisown political proposal and win the election.In the aspect of mood, Obama uses a large number of declaratives to express hisown political opinion and proposal. He employs the declaratives skillfully to make theaudience support himself. On the contrary, he seldom uses interrogatives andimperatives. These two moods are only employed on special occasions. Modality is aneffective interactive way between the speaker and the hearer. The modal words “can",“will" and “must" can express different interpersonal meanings. Obama also usesthese modal words skillfully to realize the interpersonal meaning. The selection of personal pronouns is also very important to the speaker. By analyzing this discourse,we can find that Obama uses many personal pronoun “we" to establish the friendlyrelationship and shorten the distance between the audience.The thesis finds that Obama realize the interpersonal function from threeaspects. So it proves that the interpersonal function can be realized in politicaldiscourse. Because of this, Obama uses the interpersonal function to establish andmaintain good interpersonal relation with the audience to win the election.Chapter one is an introduction to this thesis. Chapter two mainly introduces theliterature review of the study. Chapter three introduces the research design of thethesis, which consists of research questions, research method and data collection.Chapter four is the data analysis. Chapter five is the conclusion part.