Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Joseph Biden’s Political Speeches On The COVID-19 Pandemic From The Perspective Of SFL

At present,most studies on English political speeches are based on static texts and apply a single linguistic theory,and only a few scholars have studied from the dynamic perspective in discourse analysis.Besides,the multimodal discourse analysis of public political speeches from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics is less.Public political speeches on the topic of COVID-19 delivered by leaders have special contexts and some key information may be missed if the speeches are studied only on their linguistic aspects.If these speeches are studied from a multimodal perspective,more meanings that the speakers have mangaged to convey may be revealed.In this paper,the theoretical framework of SFL-MDA is applied to conduct the study of Biden’s public political speeches on COVID-19 before and after the presidential election.The main modes concerned in the study are annotated and analyzed with the help of Antconc and the table of modality analysis proposed in this paper.On this basis,the paper analyzes the distribution features of different modes in Biden’s political speeches,and compares the similarities and differences of mode distribution and frequencies in the two stages.After that,the paper explains the representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning realized by these modes,and how the speaker uses various modes to achieve the goals of these speeches.The research shows that Biden is more inclined to use auditory modes,such as the falling tone,the stress and the pause,to achieve the goals of the speeches.At the same time,Biden also relies on visual modes,such as gestures and facial expressions,to complement auditory modes in order to harmoniously realize the three metafunctions.At both of the two stages,Biden chooses similar types of modality in his speeches,but there are obvious differences in some modes,such as modal auxiliaries,imperative sentences,deictic gestures,etc.The papaer has made some innovations in terms of the corpus and research methods.The research on multimodal discourse analysis of Biden’s public political speeches on COVID-19 before and after the presidential election is not only of great significance to the interpretation of Biden’s different attitudes towards the epidemic at different stages,but is also of instructive significance for the cultivation of researchers’ multimodal interpretation abilities of speeches.