Transitivity Analysis of Joe Biden’s Inaugural Address From the Perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar

Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar provides a new perspective and method for political discourse analysis. This paper first introduces the research status of political discourse at home and abroad, and then elaborates three metafunctions of Systemic Functional Grammar, namely ideational function, interpersonal function as well as textual function. On this basis, this paper makes an in-depth transitivity analysis of the inaugural address of the 46th president of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden. Through profound research, this paper attempts to reveal how English language is applied to hide ideology in political speeches and how president Joe Biden uses various language features to persuade and inspire American people in order to reach his political purpose; at the same time, it also verifies the practicability of Systemic Functional Grammar in the analysis of political speech discourse.