Transitivity Analysis of American President Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address

Zhu Yujie

doi:10.11648/j.ijla.20180602.11

Abstract

Political public speeches cause a large amount of attention, due to their political, economic and cultural influence. This thesis adopts Systemic-Functional Grammar as its theoretical framework to conduct a transitivity analysis in American President Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address. The aim of this thesis is to find the political motivation hidden by the form of language. At the same time, this thesis tries to explore the deep social significance via transitivity analysis of the ideational function. In Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address, the material process is the most frequently used process. The relational process and the mental process take the second and the third respectively. In transferring power to the people, material process is strongly involved. In advocating for U.S. interests in international contacts -- America first, relational process top the list of all the six processes. In recovering the audience’s confidence and looking forward to a better future, American President Donald Trump applied different mental processes. On the basis of the study, the researchers can better understand the thinking manner and cultural features of Westerners. Besides, it is a worthy study to uncover more differences of language expression between the East and the West.

Highlights

Halliday [4] has researched the Inheritors written by William Golding from the perspective of transitivity, which becomes the first application of Systematic Functional Grammar to analyze literary works
Based on Halliday’s Systematic Functional Grammar, this thesis, by analyzing American President Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address, attempts to find the political motivation hidden by the form of language
Significant differences are found in the frequencies of the six process types in this speech, which will be further discussed

Summary

Introduction

Huang Guowen [15] studies six English versions of the Chinese poem “Qingming” by using Interpersonal Function theory. He mainly focuses on the characters in the poem. Zhu Yongsheng [8] studies thematic progression patterns and discourse analysis. When it comes to using Systematic Function Grammar to analyze political speeches, many scholars have studied them. Such scholars as Wang Fang [13], Kong Jing [11], Liu Ming [12] and so on. Few scholars have studied a piece of political speech from ideational function

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion