The Interpersonal Functional Analysis Of The American Universities’ Commencement Addresses

According to Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, there are three meta-functionsof language, which are ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function.Among the three meta-functions, the interpersonal function means that people use language tointeract with each other in order to establish and maintain social relations. The interpersonalfunction is used by people to express their attitudes and intentions, and attempt to influencethe others’ attitudes and behaviors. Therefore, the interpersonal function of language is veryuseful, it can help people to communicate with each other smoothly and maintain socialrelationship in the daily communication.In American university, commencement address has become a kind of typical andtraditional activity. It can not only show campus culture, but also is a kind of human socialactivities. Many domestic and foreign scholars have carried out analysis of thecommencement address from various angles, such as literary style or writing skills, but rarestudies are done in the perspective of interpersonal function.The thesis is based on the Systemic Functional Grammar theory, and select10commencement addresses of the American universities from2007to2014as the researchcorpus. In this thesis, the author uses qualitative and quantitative research methodssimultaneously to explore the realization of the interpersonal function in commencementaddress. The thesis analyzes the realization of the language’s interpersonal function from threeperspectives of mood system, modality system and personal pronoun system.In mood system, we can find that declarative mood takes up a big percentage, followedby interrogative mood and the imperative mood. This just accords with the two basicfunctions of the commencement address: persuasive function and instructive function. Declarative mood is used to provide information, such as the problems of society, personalexperience, suggestions and expectations and so on. It makes the speech more persuasive andacceptable than the other mood types. Then in the modality system, we can find thatmodulation takes up larger percentage than modalization. It shows that the main purposes ofthe commencement speakers are to give the graduates practical suggestions and hope them toaccept these suggestions more willingly. So the use of the former can make the speech moreobjective. We also find that the use of the low and median modality value is more frequentthan high modality value. This enables the speaker to be responsible for speech content andcan shorten the distance between the speaker and graduates and build a harmoniousatmosphere. Finally, from the perspective of personal pronoun system, the use of the firstpersonal pronoun is more frequent than the second and the third one. That is to say, thespeakers usually convey information to graduates from their own point of view in order toarouse the graduates’ attention. In this way, the speech content and suggestions become moreacceptable.The thesis can help us get a deeper understanding of western campus culture, andbuild a reference model for studying public speech. It also has great help for English learnersto improve their oral English and appreciation abilities.