Features Of Intercollegiate English Debating Competition: A Systemic-Functional Approach

In the present thesis, Systemic-Functional Grammar represented by Halliday is applied to disclose various features of Intercollegiate English Debating (IED) discourse through the analyses of ideational and interpersonal functions. The data used in the analysis come from the transcript of the grand final of the seventh "FLTRP CUP" National English Debating Competition between Fudan University and Zhongshan University. Three major components of the ideational meaning and interpersonal meaning, namely process verbs of the transitivity system, mood and modality are respectively examined in detail to uncover how these two meanings are realized through various lexical-grammatical patterns.After the analysis of the data, some characteristics and their functions in the mentioned aspects in IED discourse are identified and summarized before detailed explanations are given. The results of the analysis indicate that 1) in the general analysis of process verbs, material and relational process verbs are most frequently used. Besides, mental and verbal process verbs are also used time and again, although much less frequently than the previous two. Behavioral and existential process verbs, seldom find their way into this debating discourse. Although these latter four types of process verbs are used at a lower rate, behavioral and existential in particular, each of them serves special functions and conveys different information; 2) a detailed investigation into process verbs in the three parts of the competition suggests that roughly speaking, findings in each part conform to the general picture with only minor variations; 3) in terms of mood, declarative clauses prevail and realize various speech functions; WH-questions and yes/no questions are evenly distributed to either give or demand information. Two ways in which interrogative clauses are employed to give information are a) many questions, yes/no questions in particular, are not expected to be answered by the addressees because answers to these questions are obviously known by everybody; b) some questions, usually of WH type, are first put forward by the debater, who will soon provide answers to these questions. In terms of modality, a large proportion of modal expressions are used to express probability. Besides, of all the modal expressions used in the corpus, modal verbs are the most numerous.The present thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one offers the background to the study of debate, along with its purpose and research method. Chapter two provides a review of the relevant literature. Having discussed the previous studies and their problems, the Systemic-Functional Grammar is introduced as theoretical framework to guide the analysis of IED discourse. In chapter three, Halliday's conceptual work of Systemic-Functional Grammar is elaborated on with the focal points on the three contextual variables and the three meta-functions. Chapter four and five analyze ideational and interpersonal functions in IED discourse, through which some distinctive features can be identified and justified. Chapter six brings forth the conclusion from the previous analysis and gives implications of the study and suggestions for further research.It is hoped that this study may enrich the studies of the debating discourse by probing into IED discourse as one of the discourse types with features distinct from others; it may help debaters and the general public to exploit the power of language to effectively argue and persuade; lastly, this study may also help foreign language teachers and learners to gain valuable insight into how language forms and functions are best combined to achieve communication goals, which will in turn facilitate their language teaching and learning.