The Interpersonal Metafunction Analysis Of Barack

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English Language Teaching www.ccsenet.org/elt The Interpersonal Metafunction Analysis of Barack Obama's Victory Speech Ruijuan Ye Guangdong Pharmaceutical University, Guangzhou Guangdong, 510006 E-mail: leafnn@126.com Abstract This paper carries on a tentative interpersonal metafunction analysis of Barack Obama's Victory Speech from the Interpersonal Metafunction, which aims to help readers understand and evaluate the speech regarding its suitability, thus to provide some guidance for readers to make better speeches. This study has promising implications for speeches as follows: (1) Positive declarative clauses are recommended to convey information and convince the audiences with positive facts. (2) Modal verbal operators with high modal commitment can show the addresser’s firm determination to finish tasks and build up the addresser’s authority. (3) The frequent applications of “we” and “we”-“you”-“we” pattern help to create an intimate dialogic style, which can shorten the distance between the addresser and the audience and further persuade the audience to share the same proposal of the addresser. Keywords: Discourse Analysis, The Interpersonal Metafunction, Speech. 1. Introduction Halliday (1970) states that the context of a situation is arranged in three categories: field, tenor and mode. Corresponding to that, Halliday analyzes language into three broad Metafunctions: Experiential, Interpersonal and Textual Metafunctions. Each of the three Metafunctions is about a different aspect of the world and concerned with a different mode of meaning of clauses, of which, according to Halliday (1994:68), it is through the Interpersonal Metafunction that users of language establish, negotiate and assume their position in social relationships, and it is concerned with clauses as exchange. In the past decades,

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