An Analysis Of The Interpersonal Meaning Of Barack Obama's Political Speeches

In every aspect of our social life, we make a speech to convey messages, express emotions and establish a certain relationship and so on. A successful speech can effectively communicate its message, and persuade the audience into taking the desired action the speaker needs. As a result, in the process of speech making, how the speaker interacts with the audience in an effective way is quite important to the speaker.Halliday, the founder of Functional Grammar, provides a theoretical basis for the analysis of how the speaker interacts with the audience. Halliday classifies the language's Metafunctions into three kinds, namely, Ideational Metafunction, Interpersonal Metafunction, and Textual Metafunction. We use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behavior, to express our own viewpoint on things in the world, and to elicit or change others'opinions-this is what we call interpersonal function of language.The thesis, mainly employing Halliday's theory of interpersonal function of language, studies the interpersonal meanings in Obama's political speeches. The thesis generally applies both a qualitative and quantitative analysis. Through the analysis of 5 pieces of his political speeches, it is found that interpersonal meanings are mainly realized through the system of mood, modality, personal pronoun, tense, and J.R. Martin's appraisal system. In the Mood System, the speaker, in his speeches, dominantly uses declarative to offer information. In terms of modality, the speaker often uses median and low value modality to show his attitude in order to avoid being too arrogant and radical so that he could shorten the distance between him and his audience. Similarly, complicated reference of personal pronoun reflects the dynamics of the relationship between the speakers and the audiences. Since political speech is face-to-face communication, the speaker more frequently uses the present tense to give the audience a sense of intimacy. Obama also uses the simple past tense a lot. He uses it to tell his own stories, which makes him known by more and more people, and his past experience, which indicates his concern for the public, thus winning more supporters. And there are so many words with evaluative coloring which are used by the speaker to express different kinds of feelings. The findings of the thesis are helpful for an accurate understanding of the language in political speech and can help the readers to appreciate this type of discourse in a critical way. In addition, the analysis in this thesis will be beneficial to the language learners'learning of English, their skills of delivering a speech and the improvement of their communicative ability.