| Intercultural communication in different fields such as economy, business, academics, etc is accelerating significantly with the development of globalization and internationalization. Intercultural communication is becoming a very common topic in our daily life. An increasing number of scholars have attempted to conduct research related with identity. Discourse and identity is one of the important perspectives which attract the scholars’attention in intercultural communication. This thesis makes a comparative study of identity construction reflected in acceptance speeches from American and Chinese music awards ceremonies by applying Halliday’s Systemic-Functional grammar, attempting to analyze the similarities and differences of the identity construction.Systemic-Functional grammar was put forward by the famous English linguist Halliday in late1950s. His Systemic-Functional grammar is a sociologically oriented functional linguistic approach and one of the most influential linguistic theories in the twentieth century, having great effect on various disciplines related to language, such as language teaching, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, stylistics, and machine translation. Systemic-Functional grammar is consisted of two components:systemic grammar and functional grammar. Systemic grammar aims to explain the internal relations in language as a system network or meaning potential. Functional grammar aims to reveal that language is a means of social interaction. Functional grammar consists of three metafunctions, i.e. ideational, interpersonal function and textual function. Ideational function refers that using language to talk about the world, either the external world, things, events, qualities, etc or our internal world, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, etc. Interpersonal function embodies all uses of language to express social and personal relations. The textual function refers to the fact that language has mechanisms to make any stretch of spoken or written discourse into a coherent and unified text and make a living passage different from a random list of sentences. A lot of research has been done from the perspectives of the three metafunctions in Systemic-Functional grammar. The transitivity of ideational function can provide a new research angle to explore the deep ideational meaning through the analysis of the surface meaning of the discourse. Research in discourse analysis from different fields such as advertisement, politics, and English teaching have been conducted with the help of Systemic-Functional Grammar.In this thesis, acceptance speeches from American Grammy and Chinese Mengniu Music Award are chosen to be the data for the research. American Grammy is a well-known music award in America while Chinese Mengniu Music Award enjoys a high popularity in Chinese mainland with similar award items like American Grammy. The data analysis is based on eleven pairs chosen from American Grammy Award and Chinese Mengniu Music Award from the year of2011to2013. Among the eleven pairs, nine pairs are chosen with same award items while the other two from2011and2012are collected with similar background of award recipient. The research focuses on the similarities and differences of identity construction from American and Chinese Music awards acceptance speeches. The characteristics of identity construction are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitative research is made from perspectives of persons mentioned, mental and material processes, and self-initiated clauses under the guidance of Systemic-Functional grammar. The analysis form the persons mentioned in the acceptance speeches that Americans tend to be more individualistic while Chinese tend to be more collectivistic. Americans also show the collectivistic characteristics, but compared with individualistic characteristic, collectivistic pronouns possess relatively a small proportion. The proportion of mental process and material process is much higher than the other processes. The percentage of mental process and material process is almost the same on two sides. Mental process is a process of perception, reaction and cognition of people and material process actually is the objective reflection of the experimental world and represents narrative meaning. Therefore, both sides are almost the same. From the perspective of material process, Americans and Chinese share similar style of narrating in acceptance speeches. With the analysis of actor of clauses, the percentage of self-initiated clauses spread in the six transitivity processes reveal that Americans tend to be more self-initiated while Chinese tend to be less self-initiated. Qualitative research is made from the perspectives of interaction and consistency of acceptance speech delivery style. From the perspective interaction with the audience, the number of award recipients who applied a sense of humor is almost the same on both sides. The interactive words used in the acceptance speeches are also mainly sincere and complimentary ones to express their feelings and thanks to their work mates and families. From the perspective of consistency of speech style, it can be found out that there is a higher consistency in the acceptance speech delivery style on Chinese side.It can be concluded that Americans and Chinese share both similarities and differences in identity construction through the study of different characteristics of identity construction on both sides. Thus, a better understanding of each other can be gained to provide a better intercultural communication with people from different cultural backgrounds. However, due to the genre of the data of acceptance speeches is from music field and the number is rather limited, the findings cannot be applied in all discourse genres. Therefore, further research needs to be conducted in the future. |
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