A Contrastive Study On Political Speeches In Presidential Election From The Perspective Of Interoersonal Meaning Theory

Political speeches are delivered by the political speakers to state their stance, viewpoints, and policies about the current situation at home and abroad. They play an indispensable role in western political life, thus becoming a most watched topic for scholars at home and abroad. As one important part of political speeches, presidential election speeches deserve our attention, from which the hearers could get learned the speakers’position, attitude, and even their personal characteristics. The interpersonal functional theory, also known as interpersonal meaning system, is one part of the three metafunctions in the Systemic and Functional Grammar written by Halliday. This theory consists of four subsystems which are mood system, modality system, personal pronoun system and tense system. And this theory is used to help people to establish and maintain the interpersonal relation, influence the behaviors of others, and express their opinions about the world by using the language.The texts analyzed in this thesis are speeches delivered by the56th presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, and they are analyzed from the perspectives of Mood, Modality, Personal pronoun, and tense system based on the theory of Halliday’s Systemic and Functional Grammar. It aims to study the way how interpersonal meaning is realized through language by making the contrastive analysis of the speeches given by Obama and McCain. After making a detailed analysis, the paper came to the following conclusions:(1) As for mood, people usually employ declarative to deliver messages and make statements, and imperative is frequently adopted to encourage the audiences to take actions and bridge the distance between the presidential election candidates and the audiences, and interrogative to draw the attention of the audiences on the content of their election speeches;(2) As for modality system, to avoid being aggressive, Obama knows how to express his political viewpoints more politely than McCain as more low and median value finite modal operators are employed by Obama;(3) As for personal pronoun, the plural forms of first personal pronoun is mainly employed by the two candidates to bridge the distance between the audiences and the speaker;(4) As for tense system, simple present tense is most frequently used, so that the intimacy can be established between the audiences and them.