A Study On The Persuasiveness Of American Political Speeches In1960S From Token-value Perspective

With the extension and development of speech freedom, public speech has recently become an important approach to spreading academic fruits, conveying knowledge and expressing ideas, etc. at home and overseas. Besides, it’s been designed as an item in many language competitions. Therefore, how to achieve vividness and persuasiveness has been the focus of the academic community. Among the existing relevant researches, the ones concerning American political speeches are in large number and prominent. The researching degree being various, many scholars conducted studies profoundly from pragmatics, semantics and other respects. However, few researches employed Token and Value configuration derived from Halliday’s Functional Grammar to discuss the persuasiveness of the political speeches.This thesis attempts to employ Token&Value configuration to study American political speeches of1960s, aiming to find out the positive effects exerted by Token&Value configuration upon the persuasiveness of political speeches. Also, it hopes to provide some beneficial suggestions for subsequent public speakers. The author of the present study selects10influential American political speeches of1960s, takes advantage of Token&Value configuration, picks out the eligible sentences, arrives at the statistics of the distribution of Token&Value configuration and analyzes the example sentences thoroughly. Besides, on the basis of the statistics and analyses of examples, the author comes to the conclusion that the arrangement of the inner structure of Token&Value configuration is helpful to obtain persuasiveness. The study finds out that:1) American political speeches tend to employ the decoding pattern of Token&Value configuration to follow the sequence from question to answer, which simplifies the language to understand;2) American political speeches incline to adjust the order of Token and Value to achieve’operative’voice, which makes it easier for listeners to think and receive speaker’s ideas smoothly;3) American political speeches have the tendency to utilize the unmarked Given-New information structure, which allows the speaker to lead the listeners’ flow of thought and go deeper.Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, this thesis makes a study from Token&Value configuration to the persuasiveness of American political speeches in1960s, demonstrating an analytical process from macro-scope to micro-scope orientation. It is hoped that the present study can help promote the combination of Token&Value configuration with discourse research, and help people know more about American political speeches of1960s. It’s also supposedly beneficial for subsequent public speakers to apply the usage of Token&Value configuration to speeches to add to the persuasiveness.