| The commencement always has a special significance in the university life of American students, standing for the ending of their university life and the starting of independent life in the society. Therefore, the address in the commencement is an indispensable part of the graduation activities and the last class which the university teaches the students, which altogether expresses the university’s education ideal for the students who are going to enter the society. At the same time, recently, with the further development of the communication of Chinese and American culture, the concerning level for commencement is becoming higher and higher at home, therefore making the commencement address develop to a certain extent. As is well known, the commencement addresses of universities bear their expectations and blessings for their students. It is a magnificent part of campus culture not only in China, but also in America, and it has an individual style which is different from that of other kinds of public speaking. As a branch of modern stylistic theories, functional stylistics has been taken more seriously by language researchers in recent years. As for the study of public speeches, in the beginning, the focus of linguists and literary researchers was mostly on political speeches. However, with the continuous integration of Chinese and Western culture in recent years, the western-prevailing commencement spreads increasingly in China.As a result, the commencement addresses begin to draw the language researchers’ attention.The purpose of this study is to gain a further understanding of both Chinese and American commencement addresses by conducting a contrastive analysis of the selected addresses from the perspective of ideational function, interpersonal function as well as textual function. The reasons for the formation of their respective stylistic features are briefly discussed, so as to contribute to commencement addresses in universities at home.This thesis mainly focuses on the following three questions:Firstly, how do Chinese commencement addresses differ from those of America in transitivity system?Secondly, how do they differ in mood system?Thirdly, what are their differences or similarities in thematic structure?As for the method of study, this thesis conducts a contrastive analysis of the collected data by taking 10 commencement addresses from Peking University and the same number from Harvard University (both from 2005 to 2014) as the object of study with Halliday’s functional stylistic theory as its theoretical framework.When it comes to the result, the study of ideational function emphasizes on a contrastive analysis of transitivity system, whose result shows that material process, mental process, and relational process appear most frequently but in different order. The analysis of interpersonal function is primarily conducted on mood, reaching the conclusion that declarative clauses play an important role in both Chinese commencement addresses and American ones, especially in American ones. Besides, the frequencies of imperative clauses and interrogative clauses are distributed in common sequence, though in Chinese samples the percentages are both higher than those of America. The analytical result of textual function exhibits that unmarked themes are dominant both in Chinese and American commencement addresses. In addition, a brief discussion of the reasons for the features will be involved.This thesis not only verifies the feasibility of Halliday’s meta-function theory in Chinese and American commencement addresses, but also widens its range of study. The results provide some implications to commencement addresses of universities in China. By mastering the features of ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function in American commencement addresses, they can adopt the advantages abroad to perfect commencement addresses at home and promote their positive effects on graduates. In one word, this study is of significance. |
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