An Analysis Of Political Speeches Based On Systemic-functional Grammar

Political speech is an important part in public speech.National leaders’ political speeches often talk about international issues.Through making speeches,national leaders could convey contents to the audience and express their political opinions.Halliday’s Systemic-functional Grammar has made great influence on studying political speeches.This thesis will introduce material process,mental process and relational process in ideational function,and discuss mood,modality and personal pronouns in international function and talk about theme and cohesion in textual function.This thesis will use this theory to analyze President Xi’s speeches,summarize the characteristics of President Xi’s speeches and discuss the contents and political opinions in President Xi’s speeches.This thesis collects data from “China Daily”,selects 7 President Xi’s speeches according to Xi’s international activities from 2015 to 2017,and numbers these speeches from1 to 7.This thesis discusses three questions: 1.What characteristics are there in President Xi’s speeches? 2.What topics are discussed in President Xi’s speeches? 3.What functional meanings are delivered in President Xi’s speeches? Through analyzing,this thesis has found the following results.Firstly,in ideational function,material process is used frequently in Xi Jinping’s speeches,and its proportion is 18.75%.The second is relational process,and its proportion is7.60%.The last one is the mental process;the proportion is 6.37%.In Xi Jinping’s speeches,he uses material process to introduce how the world develops,the world situation and China’s strategies.Using mental process is to show his opinions about some things.Secondly,in interpersonal function,there are three moods: declarative mood,imperative mood and interrogative mood.Declarative mood is dominant and its proportion is98.41%.Imperative moods and interrogative moods are fewer than declarative moods.Their proportions are 1.15% and 0.44%.In declarative moods,President Xi uses simple patterns to express China’s development strategies.Imperative moods are used in the end of the speeches to show China is willing to strive,develop and make progress together with other countries.In modality,Xi Jinping usually uses the medium auxiliary verbs such as the positive verbs“will,should,would”.These kinds of auxiliary verbs could clearly show China will take actions in the future.Besides,these also present China’s mild and modesty attitudes.In personal pronouns,the plural forms of first personal pronoun are used frequently.The total number is 470.In speeches,“we” could shorten the relationship between the speaker and the audience and make them understand China’s development strategies better.Finally,in textual function,this thesis mainly studies unmarked theme and marked theme.When the subject and the theme of a sentence are the same one,this theme is unmarked theme.If not,it is marked theme.In President Xi’s seven speeches,unmarked theme is dominant.The reason is that these kinds of sentence patterns make the audience understand the speaker’s meanings quickly.That is to say,the audience could quickly know how China will develop in the future.In cohesion,this thesis mainly talks about repetition and reference.In these seven speeches,the repetition sentence patterns are “We/China will/should+verb+others”,and using this kind of sentence pattern,including auxiliary verbs,could make the audience grasp the key points quickly.In reference,this thesis studies personal pronouns.Studying President Xi’s speeches could understand China’s development strategies and development attitudes towards the world.Studying Xi’s speeches from the perspective of systemic-functional grammar could help English learners to improve their learning ability and understand the characteristics and the contents of President Xi’s speeches.