Discourse Analysis of Emma Waston's HeForShe from the Perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar

HeForShe is a solidarity campaign of UN Women, which is dedicated to women s development and empowerment. It is launched by Emma Watson in her speech at the United Nations on 20 September 2014. Emma Watson s speech was designed to call on everyone-including men-to stand up against gender injustice, take action and make a difference. From the perspective of linguistics, this paper uses the Systemic Functional Grammar created by Halliday and based on the three meta-functions of language to conduct a discourse analysis of Emma Watson s feminist speech and explore its characteristics to help the audience better understand the speaker s intention.