A Comparative Study On Chinese And American Presidents’ Commencement Addresses From The Perspective Of Functional Grammar

As the “last speech” to leave campus and the “first speech” to enter society, the universitypresidents’ commencement addresses have great significance for graduating students to sum uptheir learning experience and take future social responsibilities. However, in linguistics, littleresearch has been done in this field. Therefore, this thesis tries to make a comparative studybetween Chinese and American presidents’ commencement addresses from the perspective offunctional grammar so as to find out the similarities and differences in the functions of languageuse between the two sides.The thesis takes ten Chinese university presidents’ commencement addresses (CPCA) andten American university presidents’ commencement addresses (APCA) as research data. Basedon theories on GSP and three meta-functions, the author initially analyzes obligatory andoptional elements so as to conclude the text structure differences of the two sides. Then,through transitivity, mood and modality system and thematic progression, the author tries tofind out how university presidents use language to encourage their graduating students to entersociety and take their responsibilities.It is found that both CPCA and APCA employ obligatory elements of “displaying thetheme of commencement addresses”,“providing advices”,“calling for actions” and “expressingcongratulations to graduating students”. But all Chinese university presidents adopt “salutation”and “showing appreciation for listening” to show their speech-delivering manner, while fewAmerican university presidents use these two elements. This shows that American universitypresidents pursue more freedom in commencement. As for optional elements, Chineseuniversity presidents prefer to introduce school life and the situation about their universities toshorten the distance between graduating students and themselves, while American universitypresidents tend to convey other successful people’s life stories so that graduating students canlearn some merits and make contribution to the society.Both in CPCA and APCA, material process, mental process and relational process are thethree dominant processes. But mental process is more preferred by Chinese universitypresidents to shorten psychological distance, while relational processes type is more adopted byAmerican university presidents to achieve objectivity and logic. In mood, both the two sidesemploy declarative mood, the first personal pronouns and present tense to deliver information.However, American presidents prefer the third personal pronouns and past tense, which agreeswith their quotation of other people’s life stories to persuade and encourage graduating students.In modality, both the two sides mainly adopt modalisation, objective and implicit orientation,median and low value modal verbs to make their addresses more objective and acceptable. But comparatively speaking, modal verbs with high value are more preferred by Chinese universitypresidents to build up their authorities and to command graduating students to take actions. Inthe end, there is no distinct difference in textual function in CPCA and APCA in which parallelthematic progression type is most frequently used to make the speeches more coherent andlogical.The research can help us to understand cultural differences and develop cross-culturalawareness. Meanwhile, it also has some enlightening significance for teaching.