A Functional Study Of Projections In American Diplomatic Speeches

Projection language has increasingly been the attention of many linguistic researchers. Projection is a complex language phenomenon which refers to that the language doesn't fulfill the purpose of a representation of experience but of a representation of linguistic representation. The previous studies of projection are mainly focused on the texts of news reports, fiction, and academic articles. Whereas, American diplomatic speech is a kind of text different from other texts, thus there must be something different and unique in this kind of texts using projection, which can be reflected in the distributions and characteristics of projection.This paper mainly applies the theoretical framework of Halliday's interpretation of projection to examine the language use of projection in American diplomatic speech, and uses the qualitative and quantitative approaches to do the study. As for the statistical methods in the data analysis, we turn to the corpus linguistic tool of AntConc. The author explores the types and distribution and functions of projection in American diplomatic speeches and reveals how the ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction of language are realized via the way of projection. Correspondingly, there are three problems to be solved in this paper:(1) How many types of projection are used in American diplomatic speech? What's the proportion of each types of projection in this discourse?(2) How do these types of projection in American diplomatic speech realize the three metafunctions of language in SFG?(3) Do the types of projection embody the stylistic feature of American diplomatic speech?From the data that have obtained in Chapter5, there are three types of projection, namely, paratactic, hypotactic and embedded projection, among which hypotactic projection takes up the largest proportion of projections, which is in accordance with the stylistic features of ADS for the reason that the long sentences and complex sentences are largely used. From the point of ideational function, most projection processes are locution due to the stylistic feature of objectivity of ADS. And more projections function to project propositions than proposals in projection clause complexes from interpersonal function perspective. In terms of textual function, the speakers in ADS employ far more simple themes than multiple themes to make speech explicit and to help listeners easily get point, which is in accordance with the explicitness of the genre. With regard to projecting verbs, the significant features of projection in ADS, projecting verbs project more propositions than proposals.This research is an attempt to expound projection in American Diplomatic Speeches and it will not only supplement the studies of projection but also enrich the studies of American Diplomatic Speeches. It is hoped that this research will provide another potential genre in which projection can be explored and that through the study of projection in American Diplomatic Speeches readers can obtain a better understanding of American Diplomatic Speeches and then the whole texts of American Diplomatic Speeches.