This paper focuses on the comparative analysis of Obama’s inaugural address and his commencement speech at Barnard College from the perspective of three metafunctions in Systemic-Functional Grammar to explore how Obama adjusts his language to meet the theme of these two speeches and his different intentions in these two speeches.

The addresser of these two speeches in the same: President Barack Obama. The background, the audience, the aims of the speaker and the relationship of the speaker with the audience differ in these two speeches. The audience in the inaugural address is the American people or people all over the world who watch his address through TV or radio. In this inaugural address, Obama aims to get trust and support of American people and convince them that his government can lead them out of the economic crisis. The audience in the commencement speech at Barnard College is the graduating students. In this speech, Obama aims to encourage them to bravely face the future and shoulder their responsibilities. As the themes of these two speeches differ, Obama adopts language features to meet his according aims in these two speeches, which can be revealed in the three matafunctions of these two speeches. The following is a summary of the analysis of these two speeches.

Ideational function is mainly realized by transitivity system and voice system. Transitivity system is made up of six processes-material process, relational process, mental process, behavioral process, verbal process, and existential process. In these two speeches, material process, mental process and relational process play a dominant role, of which material process takes the highest proportion, which reveals the objectivity of political speeches and shows the vigor and vitality of the speaker. The different sequence of six processes reveals different choice of words Obama explores to meet his different aims in these two speeches. In the voice system, more passive voice is adopted in the inaugural address than in the commencement speech, which reflects Obama’s hidden intentions in the inaugural address.

Interpersonal function is mainly realized by mood system, modality system and personal pronouns. In the mood system, declarative mood, which is mainly used to give information, plays a dominant role in these two speeches. There also appears imperatives in these two speeches which attract the audience’s attention and shows Obama’s authoritative position while no interrogatives appear in the inaugural address. In the inaugural address, Obama uses a lot of “let’s-structures” to mitigate power and establishes a kind relationship with the audience while in the commencement speech, Obama uses imperatives more directly to call for the actions of the students. In the modality system, Obama uses more modal operators with median and low value in the inaugural address, which shows his willing and ability but in the commencement speech, modal operators with median and high value are adopted, which strengthens the persuasive function of the speech. As the audience and the aims Obama wants to achieve are different, Obama in these two speeches adopt different sequence of personal pronouns. In the inaugural address, the first plural personal pronoun occurs most frequently, while in the commencement speech, the second personal pronoun and the first person singular pronoun play a dominant role.

Textual function is mainly realized by thematic system, thematic progression and cohesive devices. In the thematic system, the percentage of unmarked themes is higher than that of marked themes in these two speeches, but in the inaugural address, more marked themes are used than in the commencement speech. In thematic progression, simple linear progression is most frequently used in these two speeches, but the sequence of five thematic progression patterns is different. In cohesive system, various cohesive devices including grammatical operators and lexical operators

are adopted that make these two speeches logically and coherently linked.

To summarize, Obama give these two speeches with different audience, with different background and with different aims. He adopts different language features to meet the theme of these two speeches and his different intentions. It can be concluded that language is a system of choices among which language users should make to meet the function of language and the intentions of language users.

Based on the comparative study of Obama’s inaugural address and his commencement speech at Barnard College, some implications are presented in the following.

Firstly, Systemic-Functional Grammar presents a functional approach to study language features, which helps the audience better understand the theme of the discourse and grasp the intentions of the speaker. Besides, Systemic-Functional Grammar gives a clear explanation of the close relationship between language and context, which aids in cultivating cultivating the cultural awareness of the audience.

In addition, this thesis throws lights on language teaching. In language teaching, teachers can help students analyze the connection of the features of a discourse and the theme of the discourse, provide related background information and direct the students to analyze the discourse in a certain context. Besides, teachers can cultivate students’ cultural awareness of the target language.

Although a relatively detailed comparative analysis is conducted in this thesis, some limitations still exist. Firstly, because of time and space, the analysis is only limited to two speeches, the amount of which is not enough. Secondly, in interpersonal function, there is no discussion of modal adjuncts in modality system and tense is excluded in interpersonal function. Some improvements should be made to make this thesis more convincing.

 

第二篇：写论文结论

讨论部分是论文中的精华部分，是把实验结果提高到理论认识的部分，也是唯一可以由作者自由发挥的部分。论文的作者应在讨论中着重阐述整篇论文中有创造性的内容和独到的见解，并根据本文结果，归纳其内在联系，并将全部资料加以综合分析，然后构成几个观念或提出自己的论点。写得好的讨论可以使整篇论文富有吸引力，给读者以深刻的启发和引导。讨论部分写得好坏，除与作者本身的知识水平、思维方法、逻辑推理能力有关外，还包含着一定的方法和技巧。

以下列出讨论部分的经典结构 – 俗称“倒漏斗型”(reverse funnel)：

特定的编辑对一份提交的论文手稿的要求总是遵循下面的一般原则。

1、首先对研究报告进行简短的概述（在包含多个相关研究时这点显得特别重要）。

2、描述本研究结果与过去已报道的研究文献的关系，例如：

a.你的研究结果是否与现有文献相一致？ b.你的结果如何填补现有文献的空缺？

3、阐明本研究结果与相关理论的关系。

4、描述和讨论你的研究所存在的不足或局限性。目的是预测审稿人或编辑可能提出什么问题并在他们提出之前给予回答。

5、提出本研究在实际情况中的应用，即其存在的意义和应用价值。

6、最后根据研究结果，提出有关未来研究的建议。