【正文】 interpersonal function。Functional Stylistic Analysis of Martin Luther King’s Speech I Have a Dream A thesis Submitted to College of Foreign languages Xingtan College Qufu Normal University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Bachelor of Arts ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii I am deeply indebted to Fang Ping, my supervisor, who read it through meticulously, gave me constant and valuable advice, and offered incisive ments on it. Without her help, the thesis could never have reached its present form. My sincere gratitude also goes to all my teachers who have given me excellent lectures and great help, which are indispensable to the pletion of this thesis. I also give my hearty thanks to all my classmates who have offered generous help and useful suggestions in the process of writing this thesis. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to all the writers whose works have been referred to in this thesis. 摘 要 iii 馬丁 textual function Contents v 0. Introduction ............................................................................................... ...1 1. The Ideational Metafunction of the speech ............................................. 2 . Lexical Level: the Lexical Sets ...................................................................2 . 1. One Lexical Set ..............................................................................2 . Meaning Transference between Two Lexical Sets ..........................3 . Phrase and Clause Deflection......................................................................5 2. The Interpersonal Metafunction of the Speech........................................ 5 . Formalness－ the First Interpersonal Feature ..............................................5 . Argumentativeness－ the Second Interpersonal Feature .............................6 . Polarity and Modality Analysis......................................................... 6 . Direct and Indirect Quotation..........................................................8 . Interactiveness－ the Third Interpersonal Feature ........................................ 9 3. The Textual Metafunction of the Speech..................................................... 11 4. Conclusion .................................................................................................. 12 Works Cited .................................................................................................... 13 1 0. Introduction I Have a Dream is a famous public speech by Martin Luther King, in which he called for racial equality and end to discrimination. On August 28th 1963, one hundred years after the issue of Emancipation Proclamation freeing all salves in the United States, a quarter of million people of all races came to Washington . to show their support for freedom and justice. King’s delivery of the speech was a defining moment of the American Civil Rights Movement. The speech was ranked the top American speech of the 20th century by a 1999 poll of scholars of public address. . Representative John Lewis, who also spoke that day as the President of Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee said “Dr. King had the power, the ability, and the capacity to transform those steps on the Lincoln Memorial into a monumental area that will forever be recognized. By speaking the way he did, he educated, he inspired, and he informed not just the people there, but people throughout America and unborn generations.” As a famous speech, I Have a Dream is worthy of studying from different aspects, the aspects of politics, history, literature and etc. This thesis is to research how King effectively uses the language to inspire the audience and obtains significant effects. Therefore, the author of this thesis chooses functional stylistics as the approach to analyze the speech on different levels of language, which helps to reveal how King fulfills the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions of the speech. The theoretical basis of functional stylistics is . Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics. Halliday takes language as a system work for making meaning. Each system in the work represents a choice: not a conscious decision made in real time, but a set of possible alternatives, which is called meaning potential. Halliday also proposes that language has three metafunctions: the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual. The ideational function expresses the speaker’s experience in the actual world and thinking in the speaker’s inner world. The interpersonal function sets up and maintains social relations. The textual function anizes the previous two functions by constructing a whole text through which the writer can deliver his meaning coherently and cohesively. These three functions constitute the semantic system of language and are termed metafunctions (Halliday, 1973). 2 1. The Ideational Metafunction of the Speech The ideational metafunction of the speech I Have a Dream is to persuade the audience into the belief of King that it is time for the black Americans to struggle for justice and equality without using violence. To illustrate this point, King recalls the miserable life of the black in America, explains what justice and equality means in real life, and points out the new direction of the Civil Rights Movement. . Lexical Level: The Lexical Sets The lexical level is the basic level of the ideational metafunction. Major concepts of the text appear on this level. According to Zhang Delu (2020), one of Halliday’s students, a set of words which have related mea