A systemic functional analysis of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’: exploring rhetorical devices and the variable of tenor for a better understanding of King’s context

Abstract

Having Systemic Functional Linguistics as a framework, I will pay attention to the different rhetorical devices (repetitions, exclamations, enumerations, etc.) in the speech 'I have a dream', of the great pacifist, Martin Luther King. This analysis will show how these resources allow the author to contribute to the vividness of the speech, and to build the social reality of the historical moment that the speech shows. Special attention will be paid to the situational variable of tenor because I am interested in describing the relationship that King establishes with the audience through the different rhetorical devices. This study will be helpful to understand King's human activity in his cultural context: the historical period of exploitation of the black population in the United States. My intention is to concentrate on discourse analysis in order to observe the ways in which language is productive to describe a social reality. From this analysis I will conclude that there is a clear relationship between language and meaning, i.e., the different rhetorical devices are not chosen random, on the contrary, they have a clear purpose that contributes to the way the meaning of the text is expressed by the author and perceived by the reader.