| Political speech is one of the most important speeches in public speaking. It is a speech in which speakers, in the light of their country's domestic affairs and foreign relationship, transmit their messages, state their views, illustrate their facts, and express their feelings to audiences by means of verbal languages and gestures in order to move and inspire the audiences. It plays a significant role in the political life. With the development of economical globalization, communication and dialogue among different countries are much closer and more frequent. Certainly, political speech becomes an important communicating device for giving information. Furthermore, more linguists and scholars show their frequent concerning to the political speeches, such as exploring and studying them from the respective of figure of speech, attitude and stylistic features and so on. This thesis, based on the theory of functional stylistics, selects two speeches, respectively from Chinese chairman Mr. Hu and American president Obama's political speeches to the university students, to analyze and find out their similarities and differences, searching for their reasons.Functional Stylistics, put forward by Professor M. A. K. Halliday whose main theory is Systemic-Functional Grammar, emphasizes the relationship between discourse and the context of situation and motivates linguists to study the style from the outside of the text. The thesis, according to Halliday's three metafunctions:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function, makes a contrastive analysis on Mr. Hu's speech in Yale University in April,2006 and Obama's speech to the Fudan University students at Town Hall Meeting in Shanghai Science and Technology Museum in China, in November, 2009. Mainly use quantitative analysis, the thesis summarizes and generalizes the similarities and differences between two speeches in three metafunctions through concrete data, and analyzes reasons.In the term of the analysis, the thesis reaches following conclusions:(1) From the aspect of ideational function, in six processes of transitivity system, the material process are used most frequently in both Chinese and English data, and the relational process and the mental process followed; while the proportion of the verbal process, the behavioral process and the existential process is lower. This is mainly because the purpose of a political speech is to express and provide information in an objective and definite way in order to convince the audiences and motivate them to support their opinions.(2) From the aspect of interpersonal function, whatever Chinese or English speech, the declarative mood occupies the highest proportion. In Mr. Hu's speech, 100%; in Obama's, 94.3% , there are also seven imperative clauses. But there is no interrogative and exclamative mood whatsoever. Obviously it depends on the political speech this special style, trying to give more effective information to gain the audiences' trust, and less personal feelings. What's more, it is also found that the positive medium modal verbs are employed more, which shows the speaker's modest, prudent behavior and his respect to the audiences.(3) From the aspect of textual function, the unmarked theme takes the absolute advantage in the thematic structure, which is favorable for conveying the information and reducing audiences' understanding stress. In the cohesive device, there is much difference:in English speech, the most frequently used cohesive devices belongs to conjunction, then reference and the lexical cohesion respectively stands the second and third place; while in Chinese speech, ellipsis occupies the largest proportion, followed by conjunction and the lexical cohesion. This phenomenon is related to the representation of different language and the context-culture of different countries.The core meaning of this thesis study is to provide a new orientation for the peers who are interested in the political speeches and supply some help for English learners' translation on English-Chinese and Chinese-English, based on the theory of Halliday's systemic-functional grammar.
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