| The American president Barack Obama is an excellent orator. When delivering speeches, he can not only show himself as an authority, but also mitigate his power so as to set up a desirable relationship with the audience. This thesis, based on 20 influential speeches delivered by Obama both before and after his presidency, employs Halliday's theory of interpersonal function of language to study the interpersonal meaning in his speeches.The analysis is mainly carried out from four realization means of interpersonal meaning, that is, mood system, modality system, person system and tense system. It aims to reveal what linguistic elements realize the interpersonal meaning and how the interpersonal meaning is realized in Obama's speeches. Then the result shows us that the type of declarative mood, which serves for giving information and expressing the speaker's opinions, takes the dominant position in Obama's speeches. In terms of modality system, finite modal operators are found to be the primary means to express the speaker's modality, and finite modal operators of three different values can show his attitude towards the audience and the event to varying degrees. In person system, the high frequency of "we" embodies the speaker's willingness to reduce the distance between the audience and him. As for the tense system, present tense is used most frequently by the speaker with the intention of solving the practical problems, and the tense shift between the present tense and the past tense is the main feature of tense as well.The findings of this research can be helpful for a deeper understanding of political speeches and an exposition of the political purposes that may be achieved through the interpersonal meaning realized in the speeches. It can facilitate the language teaching and learning in discourse analysis. What's more, the application of Halliday's theory in this study shows that Systemic Functional grammar is scientific and practical in the appreciation of political speeches. |
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