A Study On Interpersonal Function Of Mood In English Political Speeches

As the sub-component of public speech, political speech is considered as an importanttool to establish the identity of the government and put forward the political beliefs andpolicies. Based on Halliday’s model of interpersonal function, the present study intends tomake a detail analysis on mood element and mood type in English political speeches.Twenty English political speeches are selected as corpus in this study, includinginaugural address, presidential campaign speech, president nomination acceptance speech,presidential farewell speech, etc. Under the framework of Halliday’s interpersonal function,both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted to make a analysis of English politicalspeeches from two aspects: mood element and mood type. The distribution of the Subject andthe Finite are discussed from the perspective of mood element. The frequency and percentageof declarative mood, imperative mood and interrogative mood are analyzed in terms of moodtype.It can be found that the personal pronoun “we” is most preferred in terms of the Subject.When it comes to the Finite, the temporal operators of present and the median value modaloperators take the dominant proportion. In addition, the modal operators such as “will”,“can”,“must” are employed more frequently than other modal operators in English politicalspeeches. Moreover, declarative mood takes the predominant position followed by imperativemood and interrogative mood.It is suggested that the speaker tends to present political views and policies in theprocess of delivering speech. The appropriate language choices at lexical level and syntacticlevel help to shorten the distance with the audience so as to achieve the political purposes.