Contrastive Analysis Between Donald Trump's And Hillary Clinton's 2016 American Presidential Election Speeches From The Perspective Of SFL

Systemic Functional linguistics(SFL)is one of the most influential linguistic theories and put forward by Halliday in the early years of 1960 s.According to Halliday's Systemic Functional linguistics,there are three broad aspects for the functional bases of specific semantic system and grammatical phenomena,which are called meta-functions that provides several important methods and angles for discourse analysis.As for the meta-functions,it includes three parts,ideational function,the interpersonal function and the textual function.The speaker's relationship and social status in the political speech can also be realized by applying the three meta-functions theory.And the three meta-functions theory can also help people establish or maintain the interpersonal relation,influence the behaviors of others and express their true opinions by using the textual function.Political speech is the speech for speakers to show their stance and views,disseminates their thoughts about the current political affairs at home or abroad,which plays an important role in political life.As one important part of political speeches,presidential election speeches usually present the speakers' position,attitude,and personal characteristics.The research analyzed the American presidential 16 election speeches of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton,and the author analyzed from the perspectives of Mood,Modality,Personal pronoun,and thematic progression patterns based on the theory of SFL.It aims to study the way how interpersonal meaning and textual meaning are realized through language by making the contrastive analysis of the speeches given by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.We use the interpersonal meta-function and textual meta-function to analyze the speeches and focus on the following questions to guide the investigation:1)What are the distributions of interpersonal meta-function(mood,modality,and person pronouns)and textual meta-function(thematic progression patterns)adopted in realizing the interpersonal meaning of Trump's and Hillary's 2016 presidential election speeches?2)How do Hillary and Trump build up and keep the relationship with their audience so as to achieve their power/identity influence of their linguistic manipulation through the election speeches?3)Are there any similarities or differences between Donald Trump's and Hillary's speeches?After making the analysis,the paper came to the following conclusions: 1)As for mood,speakers usually employ declarative to make statements,and interrogative to draw the attention of the audiences on the content of their election speeches;2)As for modality system,to avoid being aggressive,Hillary knows how to express the political viewpoints more politely than Trump dose as more low and median value finite modal operators are employedby Hillary;3)As for personal pronoun,the plural forms of first personal pronoun are mainly employed to bridge the distance between the audience and the speaker;4)As for thematic progression patterns system,the paralleled,extended,centralized,crossed thematic progression patterns are used more frequently in election speeches.To make their speeches full of variation,the speakers may adopt more patterns of thematic progressions in their speeches.This thesis verified the practical applications and maneuverability of the systemic functional grammar in text analysis and made a concrete analysis of the relation between linguistic characteristics and language function in political speech.This study has a certain value in understanding the choice of speech language and the function it realizes,which leads to a better comprehension and a thorough grasp of the characteristics for political speeches.