| Power and solidarity, as two important notions in sociolinguistics, have been widely studied by scholars from different linguistic fields. Power and solidarity indicate different social identities and status between the communicators. Power is used to show social status, which emphases the distinction of age, status, and wealth of the two sides in communication. Solidarity is usually employed to show the degree of intimacy in communication, which mainly refers to the common characters in terms of age, gender, interest, religion, and race. Most of research focuses on how power and solidarity influence personal pronouns use in communication. This thesis will take power and solidarity as research object and analyze their semantic characters in proper linguistic environment.American presidential inaugural address is employed by the new president to express his administrative program, arouse the audience’s enthusiasm and regain trust and support of the public. This thesis takes Obama’s 2009 and 2013 inaugural addresses as the research corpus, and analyzes the realization of power and solidarity in relatively comprehensive materials.The author uses Halliday’s interpersonal function as the theoretical foundation and analyzes the realization of power and solidarity from the perspective of personal pronouns, mood and modality, so as to reveal the close relationships between language use and the speaker’s political intentions, and to help people have a better understanding of the speaker’s political purposes.The research questions are being raised:1. What kinds of linguistic strategies of interpersonal function are used to reflect power and solidarity in Obama’s presidential inaugural addresses? And what are the distribution frequencies of these linguistic strategies in his two speeches?2. How are power and solidarity realized by these linguistic strategies in Obama’s inaugural addresses?3. What are the main reasons that contribute to the manifestation of power and solidarity in Obama’s inaugural addresses?Halliday indicates that the property of language determines the requirement of language, which refers to the functions that must be carried by language itself. Based on the common features of language, Halliday puts forward the concept “metafunction”, including ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. As the theoretical framework of this thesis, interpersonal function serves to establish and maintain appropriate relationships between society and individuals, which is realized by personal pronouns, mood and modality.As an important component of reference system, personal pronouns can not only help the speaker indicate the presence of his listener and himself, but also illuminate his attitude toward people and things involved in discourse, which contributes to building the special relationships between the speaker and his listener. In political speeches, personal pronouns are selected to reflect the speaker’s various choices of identification.In functional grammar, mood mainly embodies the exchange function, which is composed of subject and finite. According to the various speech roles and commodities in exchange, there are four different speech functions: state, offer, ask and command. Their corresponding constructions are declarative, interrogative and imperative sentences. Typically, in political discourses, declarative sentences are most frequently used, because it can provide information and achieve declarative functions. Interrogative sentences are employed to seek information and realize query function. Imperative sentences appeal to the public to take actions, which can achieve injunctive function.Modality refers to the speaker’s judgement of the truth or validity of a proposition, by which the speaker takes up a position and signals the status. Through the use of modal operators, the speaker shows his own opinions and attitudes towards what has been said. In political speeches, modality can be realized by modal auxiliaries, modal adjuncts, modal adverbs and metaphors of modality.In order to make the research corpus more reliable, the author downloads Obama’s inaugural addresses in the year of 2009 and 2013 from official website of American government www.whitehouse.gov/, and checks this transcript word by word based on the video which is found in Sina website: http://news.sina.com.cn.w. 2013/042326.shtml. This thesis will totally choose 36 sentences from 196 sentences in Obama’s inaugural addresses for further research. Through the quantitative and qualitative approach, the manifestation of power and solidarity can be deeply analyzed.According to the theory of Halliday’s interpersonal function, the author tries to analyze the realization of power and solidarity in Obama’s inaugural addresses. Through the detailed analysis, the research results are summarized as follows.In the use of personal pronouns, this thesis performs statistical analysis on singular and plural forms of the first person, second person and third person. Quantitative analysis presents that the first person pronouns occupy 74% and their plural forms have the highest frequency. Since the second person pronouns often completely separate the speaker from his audience, “you” and “your” only appear 20 times in Obama’s two inaugural addresses. The first singular person pronoun “I” which gives prominence to the subject status is just used for 6 times. So it is obvious that Obama tends to employ “we”, “our” and “us” to show the intimate relationships between the public and himself. However, in some special circumstances, as the top leader and the representative of the governing class, Obama delicately uses appropriate personal pronouns to show his commands or warnings so that he can highlight his authority and steady American hegemonic position in international affairs.In the use of mood, declarative sentences have the highest percentage; the proportion of imperative sentences is relatively lower; interrogative sentences do not appear in these two speeches. The distribution features of different types of mood contact with the speaker’s political purposes deeply. In his inaugural addresses, Obama’s primary task is to promote his administrative strategy and regain people’s support. Thus, as a tool of providing and conveying information, the declarative is applied throughout the whole discourse. In order to deal with the economic, diplomatic and environmental issues efficiently, Obama also uses the imperative to show his commands and encourage people to actively respond to his call. Due to the strong injunction of the imperative, if Obama overuses imperative mood, it may produce a feeling of distance. Thus, imperative sentences only appear 13 times in his inaugural speeches.In the use of modality, the occurrence frequencies of modal operators from high to low are as follows: median value modal operator “will”, low value modal operator “can” and high value modal operator “must”. “Will” is applied to speculate on what may happen in the future and express the speaker’s willingness to do something. “Can” is employed to illustrate the speaker’s inference about things that may happen in the future, but the probability of occurrence is very low. Besides, it is used to show the permission and recognition of the addresser to the addressee’s behaviors. “Must” shows the speaker’s high confidence in his inference or conveys the necessity of doing something. Different values of modal operators have different expressive effects. In the two speeches, Obama uses the high value modal operator “must” to show his commands or orders and call on his people to make effort for their country. In order to enhance the friendly relations with the public, Obama employs median value modal operators to manifest his intimacy and solidarity.After analyzing the realization of power and solidarity, the author tries to find out the reasons that contribute to the manifestation of power and solidarity.There are mainly three reasons why Obama attempts to show his powerful status. Firstly, he aims to regain the trust and support of the public. In the early stage of Obama’s office, due to the poor administration of the government, there are a lot of severe problems, such as economic downturn, increase in unemployment rate, and diplomatic tensions, which make American people deeply feel dissatisfied with their government. In his first appearance as the president, Obama should undoubtedly show his authority and self-confidence so that the majority of people will believe he has the ability to lead them out from bad conditions. Secondly, he intends to win more interests for America in the international business. After the long-term wars with Iran and Afghanistan, the American economy has suffered a great loss. Obama applies the powerful language to show the first rank of American science and technology, military and economic capability in the world. His powerful word can promote the friendly cooperation between America and other countries, and help America gain the core interests in the international affairs. Thirdly, in recent years, as China and German have gone from strength to strength, the international position of the U.S. is unstable. In order to regain the hegemonic status, Obama applies authoritative language to illustrate his determination and confidence in leading the world so that people of the world will believe that it is well deserved for America to become the international leader again.Obama is more likely to manifest his solidarity, and the reasons are as follows. Firstly, throughout the history of America, it is not hard to find that the pursuit of freedom is based on the moral values of justice and equality. In order to comply with the core moral principle, Obama abundantly employs the language of solidarity to express his kindness and equality. Secondly, it is a wise choice to maintain a friendly relationships with the public so as to deal with the serious issues in the country. Obama tries to get closer to his people by manifesting his democracy and fairness and then makes people believe that the president will work together with them to create a brilliant future for America. Lastly, the development of U.S. has been obstructed by the diplomatic tensions. In order to alleviate the tensions with some Middle East countries, Obama clearly demonstrates his diplomatic strategy of mutual benefit and coordinated assistance. Through the concerted efforts, he hopes the complex international relationships will be simplified, and America will have a new future in the peaceful environment.The research results can be summarized as follows. First of all, power and solidarity in Obama’s inaugural addresses are realized by personal pronoun, mood and modality system, but these resources are not evenly distributed. Through the quantitative analysis, it can be found that Obama is more willing to manifest his solidarity rather than show his power. Additionally, the aims of his speech are to give information, encourage people and gain support from his audience. In order to show his authority and the prestige of America, he always uses powerful statement. In personal pronouns, he attempts to use “you” to make himself isolated from the public; in mood system, he always shows his commands in the imperative; in modality, he tends to use modal verbs with high value. When the president tries to narrow the gap between the public and himself, he always expresses his viewpoints in an equal way. He applies the first person pronouns “our”, “we”, “us” and modal verbs with low value to manifest his solidarity. Besides, through the analysis of power and solidarity in Obama’s speeches, the author will have a better understanding of his diplomatic attitudes and political intentions, and grasp the internal relationships between language and ideology.This thesis has some practical significance. Firstly, it provides a better interpretation for the research on the relationships between language and society. This thesis mainly illustrates how linguistic strategies reflect power and solidarity and how the social relations influence the language use, which is beneficial for sociolinguistic study. Secondly, this research employs the theory of systemic-functional grammar to analyze power and solidarity in sociolinguistics, which not only reflects the intersection of linguistics, but also extends the research scopes. Thirdly, it explores the internal relationships between power and solidarity and the speaker’s political purposes, which can enlighten the studies of political speeches. |
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