The Achievement Of Coherence And Cohesion Of Commencement Speech

The commencement speech becomes a custom of American universities nowadays. The speakers could not only express their congratulations to the graduates, but share their own stories, feelings, attitudes and propose their requirements and hopes.The American national security advisor Susan Rice, as well as the alumna of the Stanford University, gave a commencement speech at Stanford University in 2010. During her speech, she shared her experience, especially a story about a poor little boy in Africa when she dealt with international affairs. She hoped that the students could be the agent of change, changing the poor situation in society and building a world the child and every child deserved.This paper analyzes the achievement of coherence and cohesion of the commencement speech given by Susan Rice based on the theory of systemic functional grammar of Halliday and the cohesion in English proposed by Halliday and Hasan. Three questions will be answered in this paper:what is the intention of the speech? Does the speech successfully realize this intention? How does the speech achieve this intention? After analyzing the speech, it is concluded that the speech is coherent and cohesive in content, in feelings and attitudes and in logic and form, which make the theme--to solve the poverty problem and to build a wonderful world, stand out.The commencement speech is firstly divided into five parts based on their content in this paper and the data of the whole speech as well as each part are collected. Part three is the core part which will be discussed the most in the paper. Among the three functions of systemic functional grammar, the ideational function means construing experience. By analyzing the transitivity process of the speech, it is found that the material processes which show physical actions are used most frequently. A lot of material processes used in the speech rightly enable the intention of the speech--to ask students to change the world together, stand out. As for interpersonal function, the declarative sentence which is used for offering information, is the sentence type appearing the most. From the modality part, there is a change of Susan Rice’s attitude towards the little boy, however, it clarifies that the effort from just one person is very limited and everyone needs to work together. As for the textual function, the theme of most sentences are "he" or "that child", which both represent the little boy. It shows that the little boy is the main topic of the speech and the continuation of the text is by repetition of the same themes. In addition to the approaches above, there are other grammatical or lexical cohesive ties helping the coherence and cohesion of the commencement speech.On one hand, this paper discussed a real commencement speech given by Susan Rice. It deepens the understanding of hearers and the audience about the commencement speech. Moreover, by analyzing the achievement of coherence and cohesion of the commencement speech, the hearers and the audience know more about the content, feelings, structures and the way to realize speakers’attitudes in the speech. On the other hand, this paper reflects the application of the systemic functional grammar to the real life experience.