A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In State Of The Union Addresses

State of the Union Address (SUA) is the annual address made by President of theU.S. to the Congress, which reports latest situations abroad and at home andillustrates the plans of the government.Many studies of SUAs have been conductedthese years, but most of them have been donefrom the perspective of lexical features,grammaticalfeatures, stylistic features, and rhetorical features.This study aims to take a critical discourse analysis of SUAs based on the theoryof Systemic Functional Grammar. In this research,3SUAs, which are made byClinton in1994, Bush in2005, and Obama in2013respectively, are chosen atrandom as research samples. This research focuses on:1) What aspects are involved in realizing the interpersonal meaning in SUAs?2) Howthese aspects are employed to realize interpersonal meaning in SUAs?By combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, a detailed analysis hasbeen taken to find that:1) In realizing the interpersonal meaning in SUAs, mood, modality, and personaldeixis are playing indispensable roles.2) In order to achieve the interpersonal meaning, mood, modality and personal deixisare employed differently in degree and frequency of use. To be more specific, interms of mood system, the declaratives are most commonly used in SUAs; inmodality system, modulation is used more frequently than the modalization; as for theorientation in modality, the subjective implicit is dominant in SUAs; when it comestomodal value in SUAs, modal verbs of median value are applied most frequently.As far as person system is concerned,SUAsemploythe first person plural form “we” mostfrequently.