A Contrastive Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In The Discourses Of English Celebrating Speech And Memorial Speech

Celebrating speech and memorial speech, as two categories of etiquette speech, play animportant role in our social lives to build and consolidate the interpersonal relationship.However, the previous studies about them mostly focus on their development history,classifications, or stylistic features. Few scholars have been devoted into studying theinterpersonal meaning of these two practical styles. As a result, based on Halliday’s theoriesabout interpersonal meanings under the framework of his systemic functional grammar, thisstudy makes a comparative study to find out the similarities and differences of the realizationmeans realized by some lexical-grammatical resources of the interpersonal meaning in theEnglish celebrating and memorial speeches.The research data are thirty English celebrating speeches and thirty English memorialspeeches, which are typical and representative. They are all collected from the internet andwritten by famous English native speakers. Mood, modality, and personal pronoun system arechosen as the points of penetration to reveal the differences and similarities of the realizationmeans of the interpersonal meaning of the two etiquette speeches. Both quantitative andqualitative studies are employed: the samples of each aspect of the two kinds of speeches areindentified and counted; then the numbers and percentages of each aspect are comparedbetween the celebrating speeches and memorial speeches with SPSS; at last, an interpretationof the data is conducted.It is found that:(1) As to the mood system, the two etiquette speeches are all dominated by thedeclarative mood to realize the basic function of a speech—delivering thoughts andinformation. The difference is that the English celebrating speeches uses moreimperative sentences beginning with “let’s” to inspire and encourage the audiences,but the English memorial speeches employs more wh-questions to guide theaudiences to think and recognize the noble virtue and spirit of the departed person.(2) As to the distribution of modality system, the three main modal verbs “can”,“will”,“must” have the similar frequency of occurrence in the two types of etiquettespeeches, i.e.“will” is used mostly following by “can” and “must”. This frequency of occurrence has close relationship with the modal verbs’ meanings and the social andinterpersonal functions of the two types of speeches. The nuance is that the modalverb “can” mostly means “ability” in the celebrating speeches and mostly means“probability” in the memorial speeches.(3) As to the use of the personal pronouns, the two kinds of speeches all use the firstperson pronouns mostly and the second person pronoun least. The author thinks thatthis relates to the two etiquette speeches’ social functions and interpersonal purposes.The above findings further confirm that Halliday’s systemic functional grammar isscientific and applicable for the analyzing of a discourse’s interpersonal meaning. Besides that,this research shed some light on the learning of English and appreciating of the Englishculture. What’s more, this analysis also does a favor for speech lovers to improve theirlecturing skills.