An Analysis Of Trump’s 2018 State Of The Union Address:A Perspective Of Systemic Functional Grammar

Known as the US government’s policy agenda,the State of the Union Address(SOUA)is a representative political discourse,which mainly involves major issues at home and abroad and related government decisions.Nowadays,the SOUA is not only a powerful means for the president to control relations with the Congress,but also an important channel for him to effectively lead the country.Based on the theory of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar,this paper takes the US President Donald Trump’s 2018 SOUA as a corpus,and analyzes the text from such three analytical perspectives as transitivity,modality and discourse with an aim to expose the discourse characteristics of Trump’s SOUA and the hidden meanings behind the discourse.Based on the research,there are three main findings as follows: 1)From the perspective of transitivity analysis,Trump’s SOUA mainly employs material,relational and mental processes to talk about domestic situations and foreign challenges.2)From the perspective of modality analysis,Trump makes use of the first person pronouns and the medium-value modal verbs to promote his own people-friendly line,the past tenses and perfect tenses to demonstrate his personal achievements to the American public,and the future tenses to draw a wonderful blueprint of the future for the American people so as to gain public recognition.3)From the perspective of discourse analysis,the SOUA mainly adopts the constant theme and linear theme progression,which enhances the appeal of the speech language.In addition,those thematic progressions are used to talk about the interests of the America’s public interests in order to achieve the political intentions to persuade and unite American people.This article is divided into five chapters.The first chapter mainly introduces the research background,objects,methods and significance.The second chapter is the literature review of political speech research from both home and abroad.The third chapter is the theoretical framework as well as research methods,mainly introducing and sorting out the systemic functional grammar and thus providing a theoretical support for the research.Based on the theoretical framework of the systemic functional grammar,the fourth chapter gives a detailed analysis of Trump’s SOUA in terms of ideational,interpersonal and textual functions.The fifth chapter elaborates the implications obtained through the above analysis.The sixth chapter is the conclusion,including the findings of this paper,the limitations and the prospect of this study.