Persona Building In Commencement Address: Co-articulation Of Meanings In Steve Jobs’2005Stanford Commencement Address

The commencement address nowadays means more than a ceremonial speechdelivered to the graduating class. As it is possible for any individual to use a digitalvideo recording device and post a video clip on the Internet, a commencement addressis in effect a worldwide presentation that is accessible to different people from all agesthroughout all continents. The commencement address provides a great potential forlinguistic analysis as language is the basic element of this type of ceremonial speeches.However, few studies have laid their research focus on commencement addressesfrom the perspective of discourse semantics, and none of them has explored thepersona being built in commencement address. This study undertakes a textualanalysis of the commencement speech delivered by Steve Jobs at Stanford Universityin2005to see how the speaker’s persona is built. For analytic framework, this studyexplores the co-articulation of persona in the discourse from the perspective ofsystemic functional linguistics. It has been suggested in this study that speakerspresent their persona with the co-articulation of ideational, interpersonal and textualmeanings via their language use selected from their own repertoire. It is very likelythat the speakers present themselves as having particular virtues, holding positiveattitudes towards life, and having extraordinary talents, tend to align the audience intotheir opinions and invite the audience to regard their emotions as valid and even toempathise and sympathise with them. As for the audience, the persona beingpresented is discernible to the audience with the co-articulation of the three strands ofmeanings as the addresser and the addressee share a common nucleus within the samereservoir.