| On November11th,2008, an event caused a great sensation in the whole America-Democratic nominee Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America and Obama became the very first African-American president elected in the U.S. history. On November6th,2012, Barack Obama defeated the Republican nominee, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and was re-elected President of the United States of America. Despite his devices on politics, Obama’s exceptional eloquence also exerts a strong influence on the voters and helps him win a majority of supporters and Obama’s speeches can be the best examples for the study of the realization of the interpersonal metafunction in a discourse.By Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, language mainly has three metafunctions:the ideational metafunction, the interpersonal metafunction and the textual metafunction. By the interpersonal metafunction, he means that people use language to express their viewpoints and try to influence others’attitudes and behaviors and realize their specific social purposes. Halliday’s interpersonal metafunction theory provides us with a feasible way to analyze the social meanings in Obama’s speeches.Based on Halliday’s interpersonal metafunction theory, this dissertation selects Obama’s victory speeches of2008and2012as the study objects. The dissertation conducts the contrastive study mainly from the analysis of the personal pronouns, Finite elements, and the choice of Modal Adjuncts, aiming to discover what have changed in the aspects of Mood and modality from2008victory speech to2012’s and to analyze what factors cause these changes in the clauses.By contrast, the dissertation first analyzes the specific reasons of those changes and what Obama aims to put emphasis on in2012victory speech. Besides, the study shows how the interpersonal metafunction works in a political speech and illustrates how Obama utilizes the interpersonal metafunction to realize his social aims in his speeches. |
PDF Full Text Request