An Analysis Of "I Have A Dream"

Ever since the delivery of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech"I Have a Dream"on Washington March on August 28, 1963, this 1720-word speech text has been repeatedly studied and analyzed by many scholars and researchers both at home and abroad. Without little exception, all the researches agree that powerful persuasiveness is the most remarkable feature in this public political speech. These researches were done mainly in the aspects of auditory phonetics, rhetoric, literary stylistics, and literary criticism, but few in Hallidayan SFG.Halliday maintains that his SFG theory is"for purpose of text analysis"(Halliday, 1985/1994: X). After the publication of his interpretive analysis of The Inheritors by W. Golding in 1973, many linguistic scholars followed his step to analyze different texts. However, the application of this interpretive analysis to the speech"I Have a Dream"is very rare.Considering this situation, this paper attempts to apply Hallidayan SFG to proving that the widely accepted feature of persuasiveness in the speech text is realized by repetition of theme, mood and modality elements, and processes. The repetition of the theme in the thematic progression greatly helps the achievements of persuasiveness. The repetition of the mood elements builds up such a close solidarity that the audience are tremendously convinced and persuaded. The material and relational processes contribute to the speaker's goal of persuading his audience.This paper boldly combines the three layers of Hallidayan SFG theory for compartmentalizing each clause (Appendix 2). This greatly avails to better comprehend the analyzing processes of this paper. Another feature of this paper is the application of the analyses of personal pronouns to the achievements of persuasiveness.It is strongly hoped that this paper may shed some light on the future teaching of Hallidayan SFG, assist the readers in better appreciating this famous public political speech and offer some enlightenments on writing English public speech.