Transitivity Analysis Of The American Presidential Inaugural Address

To all Americans, there is no more important event than the general election of a new president. Beginning from the first president, George Washington, every president will deliver an address on the Inauguration Day and hundreds of thousands of Americans witness this ceremony of cultural transition and listen to the speech. In most cases, the new president will address the national crises and world situations of the moment and will also elaborate his fundamental political principles and particular political policies for the next four years on this occasion. And even more some addresses have become the classic masterpieces in American history, which had inspired the generations of Americans. Therefore, the study of presidential inaugural addresses has not only attracted the interests of politician and historians; but also drawn the attention of linguists. Many scholars have devoted themselves to the study of presidential inaugural addresses.It is held within systemic-functional grammar that language is a product of human social activities. As a communicational tool for people, it serves a variety of functions. There are typically three meta-functions classified by Halliday:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Halliday’s ideational function contains two sub-functions:the experiential function and the logical function. Experiential function is known as the function that language is used to organize, understand and express the perception of the world and of our own consciousness. In other words, it is the representation of the world where whatever s/he does and relation between people and circumstance. While logical function is the logical expression of the two or more meaningful units in a language. The ideational function consists of transitivity and voice and in this paper author will focus on the transitivity system. Transitivity is one-important semantic system for ideational function, which aims to express the reflective and experiential meaning. What they had seen and heard are divided into several processes, which point out those different processes contains different participants and circumstantial elements to represent ideational function in a language.The present thesis adopts transitivity analysis in Halliday’s systemic-functional Grammar to the study of American Presidential inaugural addresses to work out the functions and distributions of each transitivity process in the speeches. It mainly deals with three research parts:(1) the distributions of each transitivity type in American presidential inaugural addresses (2) the functions of transitivity processes in American presidential inaugural addresses (3) the distributions of main participants in each inaugural address and the reasons. To do a transitivity analysis, three basic tasks need to be done:first to identify the process pattern of clauses, second to identify associated participants and third to find out the main participants in the public speech. In this analysis, clauses including those that are embedded will be analyzed. With the help of corpus, the analysis of main participants’distribution will be easily found.