A Study Of Obama’s Second Inaugural Address From The Perspective Of Modality

With the increasing development of economic globalization, countries are becoming increasingly interrelated in the economic, cultural, political and other aspects of communication and dialogue. Therefore, political speeches also emerged as a kind of important means of information communication between countries. Gradually, linguists and other scholars in various fields have begun to show increasingly significant attention to political speeches. It can be said that from the date of birth, political speeches have gained various concern from people of all kinds of areas. The main purpose of political speech is that, the speaker, from a political point of view, for the country’s internal affairs and foreign relations, makes clear his standing points, clarifies his ideas, promotes his political ideas to arouse the audience’s emotions, and expects to win the supports of audience. Political speeches include conference debates, campaign speeches, the president’s inaugural speeches, diplomatic speeches, the government work reports and so on. For western countries led by the U.S. leaders, political speeches, especially a series of those made by presidential candidates in the presidential campaigns, are not only attractive and persuasive, but also more likely to attract extensive interests of scholars. The forty-fourth president of the United States Barack Obama is called the black horse in American politics, and his success is believed to be attributed to his geniuses and classic political addresses. As the political, economic and cultural exchanges have become closer among countries, political speeches in everyday life also play an increasingly important role. Therefore, analysis and discussions become increasingly important again for political speeches, especially for U.S. President Barack Obama’s speeches.Modality indicates the speaker’s subjective judgments, and is an important means to be used to express the speaker’s views and attitudes. Speakers can use modality to express a variety of emotions such as compulsions, ideas, desires, permissions, intentions, responsibilities, or the possibility of uncertainty. Modality indicates the evaluation of the authenticity on the proposition from the speaker. People can also use it to define power relations and social distance between the speaker and the hearer. In political speeches, the speaker often uses modal means to communicate their implicit ideological and political intentions. Linguists have analyzed modality system from many aspects of research, in which modal theory of functional grammar is gradually systematized, and has more practical utility. The systemic functional grammarians have focused modality study primarily on small sentence level, and modality study on discourse level is mainly concentrated on academic discourse, technological discourse, political discourse and spoken dialogue. So far not enough attention has been paid specifically to the concrete text type of the United States President’s inaugural addresses, which not only has written features but also oral features. Stylistically speaking, scholars have rarely studied Obama’s second inaugural address, because they have paid more attention to his first inaugural address.This paper selects the second inaugural-address by U.S. President Barack Obama. On January20,2013, U.S. President Barack Obama was sworn in as the United States’formally elected president again. Obama outstands in American politics because of his fantastic speeches, especially his first inaugural address which is so prestigious that has been sought after by ordinary people and gained universal attention from experts in various fields of research. And researches of his inaugural speech are endless. However, Obama’s re-election inaugural speech hasn’t been paid much attention of the common people, and some scholars even think low of it. This paper selects Obama’s second inaugural-address as the research object, and analyzes the modal orientation, modal expressions and values of modality of the speech from the perspective of modality in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. It tries to examine how the resources in the modal system are employed to make the inaugural address more persuasive and effective. This paper is intended to provide a new exploration resource for those who are interested in studying political speeches, and also provide some help for English learners in their efforts to understand and grasp the modal phenomena, develop their language skills, and improve their presentation skills, even their ability in English-Chinese and Chinese-English translations.The study process is as follows:(1) identify various parts of modal resources from Obama’s Inauguration Address in the aspects of modality expression, values of modality and modal orientation;(2) conduct modal analysis and analyze their distribution status, functions and frequencies in various parts of speech;(3) discuss why and how Obama uses many different modal resources to achieve his goals. Studies find that Obama’s speech mainly uses modal operators and modal adjuncts of modal expressions. High-value modal verb "must", low-value modal verb "can" and median-value modal operator "will" are mostly used in his address, so is non-explicit subjective and objective modal orientation. It is also found that power and solidarity factors, political inclination, responsibility, and emotion-arousing have contributed to Obama’s different modal choices. Thus the rational use of modal resources to achieve expected goals is of great significance.This paper is divided into five chapters. The first chapter introduces the research background information, the purpose and significance of the study, the research methodology, the chosen object of study, as well as the organization of this paper. The second chapter is the literature review. It presents an outline of the political speech including its definition, structural patterns and language features. And it also introduces the previous studies of Obama’s inauguration speech both at home and abroad. In addition, it describes the research history of modality which belongs to the interpersonal function of the three meta-functions in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. Chapter Three explains the theoretical framework of this study. It describes the modal system concerning its definitions, classification and characteristics. Especially, it focuses on the three aspects of modality--modal expressions, modal orientation and values of modality, which are also the foundations of the following analysis of Obama’s inauguration speech. Chapter Four, the highlight of this thesis, identifies in details various modal resources and analyzes their distributions and functions. Here modal analysis is conducted in the aspects of modal expressions, values of modality and modal orientation and moreover, it further discusses the reasons why Obama uses so many different modal resources. Chapter Five is the conclusion part, containing an overview of the previous parts, the major findings and significance, the specific limitations and several particular suggestions for further studies.