An Analysis Of The Realizing Resources Of Interpersonal Function In Barack Obama’s Network Platform "Twitter"

Recently, with the development of network technology, the social network platformshave already become people’s main access to information resources. Among them,“Twitter”,the equivalent of Chinese micro-blog “Weibo”, enjoys a worldwide popularity as a mainmedium of online communication. By means of this platform, people are able to send or sharetext-based “tweets” of up to140characters. Barack Obama is known as the first “networkPresident” who frequently uses Web tool Twitter to gain support from “online friends” for thesake of getting votes before presidency and establish his authority after presidency.Interpersonal function is a term drawn from Halliday’s theory of three meta-functionsof language. Interpersonal function means that language is used to enable us to participate inthe interaction with other people, to establish and maintain relationship with them, to expressour own judgments and influence other’s attitudes and behaviors.In this thesis, both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed to tentativelyinvestigate the realizing resources of interpersonal function in Obama’s social networkplatform Twitter based on the framework of Halliday’s theory of interpersonal functioncombined with Martin’s appraisal theory which is complementary to this study. Altogether256Obama’s tweets posted both before and after Obama’s presidency in2008and2012areselected as the research data of this study.Through analysis of these data, it has been found that President Obama’s Twitterdisplays the fullest variety of choices in mood, modality, person and appraisal system. In themood system, the study shows that declarative mood structure used by Obama to offer readersinformation plays a predominant role in carrying out interpersonal meaning and it is followedby imperative and interrogative mood. As to modality system, Through the analysis in termsof types and values of modality, it has been found that probability and obligation are usedmore frequently than the other two types. The median value modal operators are found to bethe major device to express the writer’s modality. From the perspective of person system, theuse of different pronouns reflect different psychological distances between writer and reader.The frequent use of “we” embodies the writer’s intention of reducing the distance betweenhim and readers. And the choice of “you” aims to attract readers’ attention and involve theminto interaction. At last, when Obama reveals his attitudes, he is prone to use some evaluativeexpressions, especially evaluative adjectives. To sum up, these four aspects are effectivelinguistic resources adopted by Obama in his tweets for achieving his special interactivepurpose of building up a close social links with online friends.