The Interpersonal Metafunction Analysis of Barack Obama's Inaugural Address

Following Systemic Functional Grammar, this paper, adopting qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analysis, carries on a tentative interpersonal metafunction analysis of Barack Obama's Inaugural Address from the perspective of Interpersonal Metafunction.In the process of detailed analysis, this paper focuses on the Interpersonal roles, Mood and Modality system at the level of interpersonal function.The study finds that the plural forms of the first person are mostly used, declarative clauses have an absolute advantage, and the medium and low modal auxiliaries appear most frequently in Obama's address, which aims to help readers understand and evaluate the speech regarding its suitability, thus to provide some guidance for readers to make better speeches.