A Study On Ma Yun's English Speeches From The Perspective Of Ideational Function

M.A.K.Halliday's systemic functional grammar is one of the most influential linguistic theories in the second half of the twentieth century.According to M.A.K.Halliday(1976),Languages have three functions: ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.Ideational function is about the internal and external world and it is realized mainly b y transitivity system and voice system;interpersonal function is about the meanings concerning roles and relationships which is realized by mood and modality;the textual function is about the meanings on messages which is realized by thematic and information structure.Systemic functional grammar theory has a wide ran ge of applications.The ideational function has aroused great attention of linguistics to study various genres of texts such as news,debate,advertising,film and television drama lines.The ideational function is also used to analyze the formation,the c hange and meaning of grammar.Ma Yun,who is the founder of the Alibaba Group,Taobao network shopping model and Alipay,has changed Chinese people's life in some way.He addressed a series of English speeches which could be a clue to the characteristics of this business talent.The academic studies focus on Ma Yun's Chinese speeches mainly from the perspective of rhetoric.But there are few studies on Ma Yun's English speeches in the academic field at current times.This thesis employs the ideational function theory of systemic functional grammar to analyze Ma Yun's English speeches.Ten English speeches made from 2013 to 2016 by Ma Yun are selected as the research object.This thesis focuses on the following two questions: 1.How are the six processes,the participants of the transitivity system and the voice types of the voice system are distributed in Ma Yun's English speeches? 2.How do the six processes,the participants of the transitivity system and the voice types of the voice system function in Ma Yun's English speeches? Based on the two questions,qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis are employed and the corpus of Ma Yun's English speeches is built with the instruments of UAM Corpus Tool and SPSS Statistics.The thesis finds that the six processes,the participants and the three voice types are distributed in certain laws.As to the six processes,the majo r process types are material process,relational process and mental process,while verbal process,behavioral process and existential process are the minor process types.The proportion of the processes reveals that Ma Yun regards conveying objective facts as the main point of his speech.As to participants,the first person pronouns are used more than the second person pronouns.This shows that speaker's personal views and interaction are combined in Ma Yun's English speeches.As to the voice type,active voice is the most used,followed by the middle voice and passive voice is the least used.It reveals Ma Yun's appreciation for human power and objectivity of his English speeches.The innovation of the thesis is the combination of the classic traditional l inguistic theory and new target materials,which contributes to figure out the linguistic characteristics of the materials and the speaker's business notion.