The Realization Of Interpersonal Function In Trump's Presidential Public Speeches

As a tool of communication in human life,language will be used on any occasion at any time;it links each of the world's individuals in written and verbal form in that people use language to spread information and express their intentions.As a kind of unique means,the presidential public speech is focused more and more by linguists.People applied linguistic theories to different kinds of researches from different levels.In many language analysis categories,using systemic functional grammar to study English public speeches is a relatively new attempt.The public figures often use the public speaking to express their views.As an effective way to express one's own attitude and purpose,the public speaking is becoming more and more important.The presidential political speech belongs to the public speaking,so in this paper,the author aims at researching on Trump's representative presidential public speeches in terms of systemic functional grammar.Halliday(1994)proposed the concept of meta-functions,and he thought that language is composed of three meta-functions:interpersonal function,ideational function and textual function,among which the interpersonal function has significant impact on building and maintaining social and interpersonal relationships.As the 45~thh new president of America,Trump is influenced by his own and social background,and there are lots of special features in his speeches.So based on the theory of Halliday's systemic functional grammar and Martin's appraisal theory,the paper chooses Trump's three speeches in different periods:Gettysburg speech,presidential election speech and inaugural speech as corpus data to explain how the interpersonal function is realized in the presidential public speeches from such aspects as mood,modality,personal pronouns and evaluative words.By means of the main analytical methods of quantitative and qualitative data statistics,this thesis aims to embody the language features of presidential speeches to the readers and investigate how interpersonal function can be realized in such kind of political speeches.The research arrives at the conclusion that in presidential speeches,Trump is more likely to use the declarative and imperative sentences,the middle and low force words such as“will”and“can”;as for personal pronouns,the speaker inclines to use the first and second person to express his attitude and show his style.Besides,as a supplement,choosing right evaluative words also plays a very important role in the realization of interpersonal function.The author can see that the further analysis of the perspective of systemic functional grammar will be more conducive to our understanding of both the speech itself and the speaker's personal purpose of delivering the speech so as to achieve a more accurate grasp of the discourse.The research of this paper has revealed how interpersonal function has been realized and how Trump's political goals have been achieved in his speeches.Meanwhile,this research may play a certain referential role in the related study of interpersonal function.