Viewing Joe Biden's Victory Speech in 2020 from the Perspective of Language Metafunction

Abstract

From the perspective of functional linguistics, this paper analyzes the features of the discourse pattern of political speeches from the perspective of critical discourse analysis, taking Biden’s 2020 election victory speech as a model, and explores how political speeches realize ideational functions in language through transitivity system, voice system and normalization system, and how they realize interpersonal functions through mood system and modality system, how to realize textual function through theme-rheme structure, information structure, and cohesion system. A political speaker's mastery of his own subjective and objective attitude, the shaping of the credibility and persuasiveness of his speech, the construction of one's own social identity, interpersonal relationship, and ideology can be embodied through the three meta-functions of language.