A Study On Interpersonal Meaning In Obama's Speeches At The UN Assembly

Language as the basic medium of communication plays an important role in social activities,and one of its most important functions is to express interpersonal meaning which is concerned with how people employ language to interact with others,establish and maintain social relations,express viewpoints and influence attitudes or behaviors.The UN Assembly is composed of all member states.Each representative has the opportunity to deliver a speech to express opinions on the issues under concern,clarify his stance and put forward proposals.Previous studies on such speeches at the UN Assembly are mainly conducted from the perspective of politics,with importance attached to reviews and commentaries on the contents.There is a lack of study on interpersonal meaning in the speeches at the UN Assembly.As one of the most influential American presidents,Barack Obama has delivered four speeches on behalf of the American government at the UN Assembly in the past four years.The contents of the speeches deserve consideration and investigation.Taking mood,modality and person systems proposed by M.A.K.Halliday as the theoretical framework,this thesis collects the text of Obama's four latest speeches at the UN Assembly from the official website of the White House and employs it to conduct analyses.The research constructs a corpus with the speeches and attaches labels on them.Moreover,Antconc3.2.3 is adopted to count the data.The realization of the three systems and the distribution of their linguistic properties in the speeches are investigated.The ways to realize interpersonal meaning by the three systems are also probed with the qualitative research method.The research shows that mood,modality and person systems are all employed in Obama's speeches at the UN Assembly.From the perspective of mood system,the declarative mood plays a predominant role,and the imperative and interrogative moods are seldom used.Obama mainly presents information and conveys his political views with those moods.In terms of the modality type,Obama adopts more modulation than modalization,as he aims to win the support of listeners and inspire them to take actions.As for the modality orientation,the subjective implicit and subjective explicit orientations are mainly used.The extensive use of the subjective orientation demonstrates his power and determination to make a response to the current situations.On the subject of the modality value,the modal expressions with median value contain the highest proportion,and those with low value outnumber those with high value.The modal expressions with median value show his attitudes in a mild way so as to prevent the speeches from going to extreme and make the listeners willingly accept the contents.As regards person system,the first personal pronoun is mostly used,while the third personal pronoun takes the second place and the second personal pronoun is seldom employed.The extensive use of the first personal pronoun shortens the distance between Obama and the listeners and earns the latter's trust.It also establishes the authority of America and the president.The thesis arrives at the conclusion that Obama makes a careful selection of language to build a close relationship with listeners,convey his opinions and suggestions,call on listeners to take actions and achieve the interpersonal meaning of language.The realization of interpersonal meaning has a potential influence on the cognition of the listeners and is helpful in making his opinions and suggestions easily accepted.Then the listeners may change attitudes and take actions.The research proves the practicality of mood,modality and person systems in analyzing interpersonal meaning.It is of considerable practical value to help learners enhance their critical awareness of language and improve their abilities of writing and evaluating speeches.