Systemic-functional Study On Obama's Inaugural Address

American Presidential Inaugural Address is a kind of political speech which is delivered by the newly-elected president on the occasion of inauguration. The audience of inaugural address always is the people both at home and overseas, so the new president usually proclaims the new government's national political programs and foreign policies in his inaugural address. It is also used to persuade the people to accept his ideas about those new programs and policies and to show his ability of leading America to a better tomorrow. In terms of the situations, inaugural address can be defined as a unique but important discourse which is of widely influential force and profoundly significance. As a great role it plays in the traditional culture of America, inaugural address has drawn many researchers and learners'attentions and it is analyzed from different perspectives, like sociology, psychology and linguistics. Particularly in the field of linguistics, on the basis of its features of both written and spoken, not a few of linguists make analysis of inaugural address in the angles of, like semantics, syntax or rhetoric, etc. This paper has taken Obama's inaugural address as an example to analyze its language characteristics under the theoretical background of Halliday's Systemic-functional Grammar, which falls into ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. The relatively outstand feature of this paper is that the data statistics makes great contribution to the analysis of those metafunctions.In the process of detailed analysis, this paper focuses on the Transitivity system and Voice system at the level of ideational function; the Interpersonal roles, Mood system and Modality system at the level of interpersonal function; the Thematic structure including Theme-Rheme system as well as Thematic progression patterns, and the Cohesive devices at the level of textual function.The studying significance of this paper lies in: (1) revealing the language features of presidential inaugural addresses by the means of data statistics and therefore inferring the generally linguistic features of political speeches; (2) making the readers or audience better grasp the deep sense of various kinds of discourses and actual intentions of the writers or speakers on the basis of Halliday's Systemic-functional Grammar; (3) greatly enhancing the ability in English reading of Chinese students by mastering this analysis method.