Distribution Features Of Transitivity Processes In Speeches

Transitivity approach to discourse analysis began in the early 1970s when M.A.K. Halliday made a transitivity analysis of William Golding's novel The Inheritor. Then for decades, transitivity analysis has received increasingly more attention, and many scholars have applied transitivity to analyze discourses of various types, especially on literary works and news texts. However, only in recent years has inaugural address, as a type of political speech, aroused linguists' interest. Presidential inaugural addresses are studied from many macro perspectives: political, structural, generic, stylistic or rhetoric. Most of the researches carried out from the perspective of transitivity choose only one inaugural address for analysis, and attention is given to transitivity types and their functions, whereas distributions of these processes haven't been studied systematically.The research gives both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the transitivity processes in American presidential inaugural addresses. Choosing randomly ten inaugural addresses from both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party (five from each), the author establishes a corpus. The thesis applies Halliday's transitivity theory to a comparatively systematic study of transitivity processes in American presidential inaugural addresses, focusing on the functions and distributions of each transitivity process. A comparison is also made between the distributions of transitivity processes of American presidential addresses and texts of other types, for the purpose of deducing the factors that may affect the distributions of these processes.By applying SPSS, the author analyzes all the data, and thus obtains the following findings. 1, functions of four main transitivity processes, material process and relational process express views about the objective reality and indicate that the president tends to convince the audience. Mental process expresses affection, cognition and perception. Verbal process reveals much of the president's attitude to the person he is speaking to. 2, when transitivity types are taken as the subject, material process and relational process are the best options for inaugural addresses. Mental process takes the third place which has a small proportion, while verbal process, existential process and behavioral process share the last three places. 3, the choice of transitivity processes in the text may be affected by text types and writing purposes. In most of the texts studied, despite the text types, the proportion of material process is always the largest, while the orders of relational process, mental process and verbal process vary among texts of different types, occupying the second to the fourth place, though. Existential process and behavioral process have extremely small proportions in most cases.