| As the policy agenda of the United States,the State of the Union address of the United States is an efficient channel for the President to clarify his governmental principle,stance,and ideas so as to obtain support from Congress and the general public.Lacking prior political experience,Trump has successfully become the president of the United States.His state of the Union address is also the reflection of his unique speech style.Therefore,it is necessary to study his state of the Union address.Political discourse is an important analytical topic in the field of Systemic Functional Grammar.Therefore,this thesis selects Halliday’s SFG as the theoretical framework,mainly from the three metafunctions with consideration to the contextual factors,and also in combination with the research method of quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore the discourse of Trump’s SOUA from 2018 to2020.The purpose of this thesis is to study how the metafunctions are embodied in Trump’s SOUA,and how they play a key role in cohesion and reasoning for Trump’s SOUA,and to reveal what the ideological meanings are constructed by these linguistic resources.The results show that:(1)In terms of ideational function,as to the vocabulary,Trump’s main keywords are related to the appellations of the United States,such as “American”,“America”,and “citizens”,which conveys that putting the interests of the country and the people in the first place is the governing principle of his administration.In terms of the transitivity system,Trump mainly relies on material process and relational process to describe and define his remarkable political actions,successfully depicting himself as a reliable and sagacious leader.(2)With regard to interpersonal function,first,concerning the modality system,declarative clauses of mood type run through the whole discourse,Trump mainly relies on this mood to present information and and his political views,which makes the speech more persuasive and credible;secondly,Trump prefers to use more modality expressions,especially the median-valued modal verb “will” to express his firm resolution to continue to strive for a better future for his country and positive prediction of his nation,gaining and consolidating his public recognition and support.(3)As to the textual function,first,concerning the thematic structure system,Trump tends to use more simple theme,which makes it easier for the audience to catch and comprehend his political opinions.At the same time,the high frequent use of the first personal plural form “we”,which is mostly inclusive reference,help create the sense of the national cohesion and belonging and bring the psychological distance between the President and the audience closer.Second,Trump tends to use more cohesive devices of reference,lexical cohesion,and conjunction to make his speech coherent and organized instead of being too casual.(4)This study reveals that the Trump administration implements the values oriented by the actual results.Under the guidance of the ruling principle of "America First”,Trump administration pursues “Trade Protectionism”,“Unilateralism”,“Hegemonism”,and“Xenophobism” of “Nativism”,as well as the ideologies of “Political Polarization,” and “Vetocracy” in the party struggle.Finally,three variables in situational context(field,tenor,and mode)as well as American individualism and low context culture in cultural context provide some explanatory power for the specific embodiment of the three metafunctions in Trump’s address.The research value of this study is reflected in the following aspects:(1)From the perspective of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar,this paper makes a more comprehensive and in-depth political discourse analysis of Trump’s State of the Union address,which deepens people’s further understanding of the functional discourse characteristics of this political discourse.It has referential significance for the analysis of the future political discourse of the United States to some extent.(2)This study focuses on the selection of representative and epochal political speeches as the language corpora of this study,so the results of the analysis have certain realistic value for political practice.(3)This study employs Systemic Functional Grammar to interpret political discourse,which further verifies the operability,applicability,and explanatory power of this theory in interpreting political discourse. |
