Comparative Study Of The Inaugural Addresses Of President Xi Jinping And President Obama

The multi-perspective study of discourse is one of the oldest academic activities, which has resulted in suchindependent disciplines as rhetoric, literary criticism, poetics and stylistics. As a branch of modern linguistics,discourse analysis also targets research efforts at texts and systemic and functional grammar proves a powerfultool of analysis in this respect. The analyses of political speeches have been a popular trend recently in theapplication of systemic and functional grammar. This paper comply with this popular trend by analyzing theinaugural address of Mr. Xi and President Obama and comes to the conclusion that the reasons why there existssimilarities and differences.In this study, the researcher make a comparative study between the inaugural addresses of president Obamaand President Xi Jinping from the perspective of transitivity and modality based on functional grammar. Theresearcher found that there are similarities as well as differences in the comparison of two speeches and tried togive explanation of what lead to these similarities and differences. The researcher also found that rarely scholarscompare inaugural speeches from leaders of different countries due to complexities of different languages. Inthis research, the authors try to employ the tool of systemic functional grammar to analyze the two inauguralspeeches of different language on account of the universal property of systemic functional grammar.In the term of analysis, the thesis comes to the following conclusions:(1) From the aspect of ideational function, of six processes of transitivity system the material process areused most frequently in both Chinese and English speech; then the relational process and the mental processfollowed; the frequency of the verbal process, the behavioral process and the existential process is lower. This ismainly because the purpose of a political speech is to express and provide information in an objective anddefinite way in order to convince the audiences and motivate them to support their opinions.(2)From the aspect of interpersonal function, both two speeches most frequently used the first pronoun ofplural form. The difference is that the first pronoun in English speech is inclusive, while in Chinese speech isexclusive. The first reason for these differences is that the two speeches are written by means of differentlanguages with English and Chinese. The essence of different languages leads to differences between these twospeeches. The second reason is that the different situations exist in two countries. The third reason is the culturaldifferences as English is low-context while Chinese is high-context.The core meaning of this thesis study is to provide a new orientation for peers who are interested in thepolitical speeches and supply some help for English learners‘translation on English-Chinese and Chinese-English, based on the theory of Halliday‘s systemic-functional grammar.