CLAUSE-LEVEL ANALYSIS OF MOOD AND MODALITY IN INAUGURAL SPEECHES: A CORPUS-BASED SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR APPROACH

Abstract

This study presents a clause-level syntactic analysis of mood and modality in English-language inaugural speeches, using the descriptive framework of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). Anchored in the interpersonal metafunction, the study investigates how finite clauses structurally realize mood types (declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamative) and how modal auxiliaries are distributed across the corpus. The dataset comprises a manually annotated corpus of 76 inaugural speeches, containing 4,504 independent finite clauses and approximately 186,858 tokens. AntConc (v4.3.1) was used for frequency extraction of modal auxiliaries, while clause segmentation and mood classification were carried out manually. The findings indicate a strong structural preference for declarative clauses (96.3%), with modal verbs such as will, must, and shall occurring most frequently. These patterns suggest that inaugural speeches exhibit high syntactic regularity, particularly in the consistent use of clause mood and modality structures. The analysis remains strictly non-discursive and non-interpretive, focusing on the surface grammatical realization of interpersonal systems, without reference to rhetorical, ideological, or thematic functions. By isolating clause-level syntactic features within a corpus-based approach, the study contributes to the structural profiling of formal political speech genres and offers a replicable model for grammatical analysis grounded in SFG.