Projection In President Obama’s Weekly Radio Addresses From The Perspective Of SFL

Projection is a complicated phenomenon of language. Many scholars at home and abroad have studied projection in philosophical, stylistic, syntactic and pragmatic perspectives. In systemic-functional linguistics, projection has been discussed from the logico-semantic relationship. Halliday (2000:250) believes that projection does not function "as a direct representation of (non-linguistic) experience but as a representation of a (linguistic) representation". Projection exists in clause complexes and embedded structures.Based on Halliday’s interpretation of projection, this paper adopts quantitative research and qualitative analysis to study projection. With fifty pieces of weekly radio addresses as data delivered by Obama from his reelection to a second term in 2012 to the end of 2014, this thesis aims at exploring projection features and analyzing the functions of projection resources in these addresses from the perspectives of projection structure and projecting verb. Through description, analysis and comparison, the author concludes that there are some projection resources in the addresses, including four categories of projection, namely paratactic projection, hypotactic projection, embedded projection and fact. As a kind of political speech, the linguistic features influence the distribution of projections in Obama’s weekly radio addresses. Hypotactic projection occurs most frequently, but paratactic projection occupies the least percentage. In terms of projecting verb, say, tell, ask, know and believe are the high-frequency verbs. They serve as important roles of indicating the speaker’s attitudes and opinions in the addresses.At present, the studies of projection in systemic-functional linguistics are restricted to written discourse, such as news reports and academic texts. Spoken discourse is seldom touched on. Consequently, this paper can be seen as a new attempt of application of projection. Meanwhile, the researches of Obama’s weekly radio addresses mainly focus on the attitude analysis under the Appraisal Theory. Therefore, this paper also provides a new angle to investigate the addresses. In addition, to study projection in systemic-functional linguistics makes teachers and students understand the nature of projection better in English teaching. It is conductive to discourse teaching and discourse analysis.