| The State of the Union Address(SUA) is the annual report presented by the president, elaborating the current situations at home and abroad, political outlines and measures of the existing problems to the Congress. Meanwhile, SUA is the key method to contribute to uniting the audience, inspiring their confidence, settling differences and the approval of the political policies. So researching how SUA applies interpersonal resources and what interpersonal functions these interpersonal resources have in SUA is of great significance.This thesis takes Obama’s 2015 SUA as an analytic text and builds an operational framework based on Halliday’s SFG and Martin’s Appraisal Theory. The analysis of the realization of interpersonal functions in Obama’s 2015 SUA is mainly from the perspectives of the modality system, the personal pronouns system, the attitudinal resources and the engagement resources. Findings are as follows:Firstly, from the perspective of the modality system, modal operators occur 74 times among which modal operators of Modulation(accounting for 94.6%) are much more than modal operators of modalization(5.4%). These operators of Modulation are used to express ability, intention and responsibility respectively. The frequent employment of modal operators expressing ability(48.6%) conveys the government’s confidence in their administration ability and builds up confidence of the audience. The adoption of modal operators used to express intention(34.3%) presents the government’s willingness and determination to develop the national economy and concern the people’s livelihood. There are also modal operators adopted to present certain responsibilities and obligations(17.1%) showing that the speaker takes the obligations and duties as granted.Secondly, from the perspective of the personal pronouns system, the first personal pronouns are largely used accounting for 79.8%, among them, plural forms of the first personal pronouns((74.8%) are far more employed than singular forms(25.2%). And most of these plural forms are “inclusive we” which lets the listeners participate in the context building and shortens the emotional distance between Obama and the audience. This makes the speaker’s views and attitudes more acceptable and thus obtains more support and recognition.Thirdly, from the perspective of the attitude system, the resources of Affect, Judgment and appreciation are all occurred, establishing the attitude position and the attitude fulfilling. Among them, the Judgment resources are used most frequently accounting for 41.6% followed by the engagement resources accounting for 32.7%. And the appreciation resources take up 25.7%. Most of these resources are positive even the formally negative ones that actually express positive meaning. Positive ideology and value judgment can inspire the listeners’ positive psychological resonance and achieve the common position.Fourthly, from the perspective of the engagement system, the employment of heterogloss( 57%) is clearly much more than monogloss( 43%). Under heterogloss, Dialogic Contraction takes up the largest proportion which includes Disclaim and Proclaim. Dialogic Contraction represses different voices by its inner consistency, conveys discourse authority and its collective orientation, expresses clearly various attitudes and viewpoints of the government and realizes the unity of disagreement in attitudes and position. While, Dialogic Expansion helps Obama to open the heteroglossic space and negotiate with the audience and the others. By negotiation, the speaker enhances persuasion of the discourse and wins the support and recognition of the listeners.This thesis builds an operational framework which proposes a new analytical perspective for the study of SUA text. It also examines the practicability and operability of interpersonal function and appraisal theory. The operational framework in this research is exploitative and only suitable for the analysis of texts like SUA. Its value of application and popularization should be further verified. |
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