Discourse Functionality of Transitivity and Modality of American Presidential Victory Speech

Abstract

The political discourse of victory speeches of American presidents has fascinated students and researchers in Sociology, Linguistics, and other studies in the world. Victory speeches are known in the American politics. As part of political speech, American presidential victory speeches are usually presented by presidents to address different issues which concern Americans and people around the world. The study aims at investigating transitivity and modality which are related to ideational and interpersonal metafunction used in American presidential victory speech. The function of these terms cannot be understood without examining of the structural constructions to help us to understand how to encode ideas and viewpoints. The data selected to this study are the victory speech of Barak Obama‘s (2008) and Joe Biden‘s (2020). The analysis is restricted to clauses that contain transitivity and modality. The data are analyzed qualitatively using content analysis procedures based on the Halliday and Matthiessen‘s (2004, 2014) modal of systemic functional linguistics. The major findings showed that both presidents used transitivity and modality to convey different issues through the functioning of transitivity and modality to audience but with different rates. It was found that there are (277) processes in Obama‘s speech and (240) processes in Biden‘s. For modality, it was found that (59) clauses contain modality in Obama‘s speech and (40) ones in Biden‘s. Obama‘s high score of transitivity and modality indicates his determination to express his desires and ideas that he is determined to accomplish what he promised during his presidential time. And also, it refers to his positive opinions and attitude towards Americans more than Biden. Finally, the current study contributed the existing knowledge of discourse analysis in investigating how discourse functionality of transitivity and modality employed in presidential American victory speech.