Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age - Sheena Gardner
14. Diachronic Change from Washington to Obama: The Challenges and Constraints of Corpus-Assisted Meaning Analysis
Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age - Sheena Gardner
Paul Bayley [+]
University of Bologna
Cinzia Bevitori [+]
University of Bologna
Description
This paper, based on the analysis of 226 speeches by American Presidents over a period of 224 years, aims at exploring what can and cannot be achieved by combining CL methods and procedures with the analysis of texts and discourse within the theoretical framework of SFL, focussing particularly on some aspects of the interpersonal metafunction (Halliday and Matthiesen 2004, Martin and White 2005). Moving beyond textual ‘aboutness’ (Bayley and Bevitori 2011), it is argued that certain kinds of lexicogrammatical patterns can be detected through the analysis of a non-annotated corpus. Moreover, with particular reference to our case-study, it is also claimed that shifts in these patterns indicate diachronic change in the rhetorical thrust of State of the Union addresses, from an ‘informative’ style, i.e. presenting a report, to a more ‘persuasive’ one, i.e. soliciting action.