Abstract
Presidential election speeches, as one significant part of western political life, deserve people’s attention. This paper focuses on the use of interpersonal meaning in political speeches. The nine texts selected from the Internet are analyzed from the perspectives of mood, modality, personal pronoun and tense system based on the theory of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. It aims to study the way how interpersonal meaning is realized through language by making the contrastive analysis of the speeches given by Hillary and Trump. After making a minute analysis, the paper comes to the following conclusions: (1) As for mood, Trump and Hillary mainly employ the declarative to deliver messages and make statements, and imperative is used to motivate the audiences and narrow the gap between the candidates and the audiences, and interrogative is to make the audiences concentrate on the content of the speeches. (2) With respect to the modality system, the median modal operator holds the dominant position in both Trump’s and Hillary’s speeches to make the speeches less aggressive. In this aspect, Trump does better than Hillary. (3) In regard to personal pronoun, the plural form of first personal pronoun is mainly employed by the two candidates to close the relationship with audiences. (4) Regards to tense system, simple present tense are mostly used to establish the intimacy of the audiences and the candidates. Then two influential factors are discussed. One is their personal background and the other is their language levels. This paper is helpful for people to deeply understand the two candidates’ language differences.
Highlights
2016 was an important year for America because the 58th presidential election was held to elect the new president
Presidential election speeches, which in most degree can help the candidates establish their image in front of the public and assist them in winning the election, deserves our analysis and through these analysis, we can receive some enlightenment in the aspect of delivering a public speech
Many scholars have done some researches on the election speeches given by president candidates like Hillary from different perspectives, such as, the perspective of critical discourse analysis, positive discourse analysis, functional grammar, most of the studies analyze the features of wordings and structures of the speeches, seldom make a comparison between the speeches given by different candidates from the aspect of interpersonal meta-function
Summary
2016 was an important year for America because the 58th presidential election was held to elect the new president. Many scholars have done some researches on the election speeches given by president candidates like Hillary from different perspectives, such as, the perspective of critical discourse analysis, positive discourse analysis, functional grammar, most of the studies analyze the features of wordings and structures of the speeches, seldom make a comparison between the speeches given by different candidates from the aspect of interpersonal meta-function. I try to make a comparison of the interpersonal meaning containing in the election speeches given by presidential candidates Hillary and Trump in the election year of 2016 and try to fi ure out the reasons why Trump can win the election
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