A Comparative Analysis Of David Cameron’s Two Political Speeches From The Perspective Of The Logical Function

Strategy is a significant feature in political speeches.The speakers always use firm stand,full and eloquent reasoning,and above all,tight logic to persuade the listeners to accept their opinions.Therefore,the two political speeches made by Cameron,the British ex-Prime Minister are selected as the research objects.The first is the speech to retain Scotland fondly before the Scottish referendum;the second one is his resignation speech after the Brexit referendum.This thesis adopts Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as the theoretical framework,takes the logical function as the guiding theory,and uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to do this research.The comparative discourse analysis of these two speeches are conducted at the clause level,the span level,and the discourse level respectively.The analysis at the clause level combs the logical organization of the two speeches;the analysis at the span level reveals the characteristics of the logical structure of the two speeches;the analysis at the discourse level shows how the different logical structures can help to achieve the purposes in the two speeches.The conclusions of this thesis are as follows.First,from the clause level: firstly,Cameron makes good use of the hypotactic clauses in the two speeches to make the main information in the clauses more prominent,thereby deepening the theme;secondly,Cameron uses simple clauses frequently in the first speech to increase the rhythm and momentum;thirdly,Cameron uses complex clauses frequently in the second speech to give the listeners a sense of narration and make the tone more stable and calm.Second,from the span level,in the first speech,Cameron uses “the general to the specific and back to the general”structure and paratactic repetition to enhance the appeal of the speech;in the second speech,Cameron uses the changes of personal pronouns to indicate the changes of the theme in spans to shorten the distance with the listeners and win the trust of the listeners.Third,from the discourse level,in the first speech,the logical structure used by Cameron is more paratactic.The paratactic spans are used as a prelude for the final climax,which increases the appeal and persuasiveness of the first speech;in the second speech,the logical structure is more hypotactic,which makes the argument more detailed and credible.Three implications have been attained as follows.First,this thesis is a practice to use the logical function for discourse analysis and it provides a new analytical attempt for the discourse analysis based on the Systemic Functional Grammar.Second,this thesis helps to clarify the relationship between logical structures and political purposes,and reveals how language transmits meaning and achieves its purpose with the help of the logical structure.Third,from the practical level,it helps the speakers to improve their speaking skills,writing skills and other expertise in making speeches.And it is also helpful for English learners to know more about British history.To generalize,this thesis uses the logical function of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar to make comparative discourse analysis,which means much both theoretically and practically.