Functional Stylistic Analysis Of Us First Lady Michelle Obama’s Speeches

Michelle Obama, the US First Lady and also an eloquent speaker, helped her husband win the presidential election and the confidence of most American people. So her public speeches are worthy to be studied. Halliday’s functional stylistics is a stylistic school based on systemic functional linguistics. The three metafunctions of the theory drawn from a plenty of functions of a certain text include ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. The three functions correspond to field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse of contextual factors in functional stylistics respectively. The author will analyze Michelle’s public speeches with the guidance of functional stylistics in order to reveal her speeches’ social, political and cultural significance.The author chooses Michelle’s three representative speeches as the research data. They are the speech at Peking University, the speech in London female School, and the speech at Democratic National Convention, canvassing for Obama presidential election respectively, aiming at showing her persuasive speech skill and ability of using appropriate words in appropriate place to realize the effectively communicative purpose of the public speech. With the help of the functional stylistic analysis of Michelle’s public speeches, the author tries to find out the widely existential ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function of public speeches and show how public speakers successfully make use of the three functions of speech to express their political view point to achieve mass support. And the thesis also tries to find the appropriate language style and expressions to help speaker achieve the best effect of public speeches and gain certain practical value of functional stylistic analysis.