摘 要

美国总统演讲是政治公众演讲中的重要组成部分，对美国总统公众演讲进行系统广泛的分析有实用价值和现实意义。本文从语言学的这些角度：词汇层面，句法层面和修辞手法研究了美国总统奥巴马演说的整体文体特征和它们达到的效果。同时，本文以奥巴马两次竞选演讲和两次就职演讲为语料，从词汇、句法和修辞等方面研究了演说的文体特征和效果，并通过情境语境分析法来分析演说词的语篇特色。本文主要的发现有如下：在词汇方面，因为奥巴马公众演讲的场合是非常正式的，所以名词化得到了一定使用，同时它也和一些口语化的词语交替使用。在句法层面，短句的使用占据了大多数因为短句更容易形成音律而且容易被理解，也更贴近生活。奥巴马演讲中运用的修辞手法有平行结构，明喻和暗喻等等。这些手法对于赢得观众的支持，吸引他们的注意都是非常有用的。本文情境语境的分析将基于对一定的社会文化，传统习俗和历史的深刻理解，同时也将与奥巴马演讲的背景联系起来。上述这些都会在本文中以细节的方式得以体现。

关键词：英语公众演讲；文体学特征分析；情境语境分析

Abstract

American presidential address is a significant type of public speech. The systematic analysis of American presidential address has significant practical and pragmatic value. This paper studies general stylistic features of American presidential addresses given by Obama from linguistic dimensions, such as lexical level, syntactical level and rhetorical devices. The paper will choose two Obama’s victory addresses in 2008 and 2012 and two inaugural addresses given in 2009 and 2013 as corpus. Another analysis focuses on the contextual situation of address.

The major findings of this study are as follows: At the lexical level, nominalization words used a little, because Obama’s public speech is very formal. At the syntactical level, the short sentences take the majority of the speech because they are much easier to make a rhyme of strength and be understood and more familiar to public. There are some rhetoric devices used in Obama’s speech such as parallelism, repetition, simile and metaphor and so on. These devices are helpful to gain the audience’s support and attract their attention. The contextual situation must be related to the discourse with the background of address. In other words, an accurate understanding of social cultures, traditional customs and historical background will help audiences to understand the address.

Keywords: English public speech; stylistic features and analysis; contextual analysis

CONTENTS

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Background and Objective of Study 1

1.2 Method of Study 2

1.3 Structure of Paper 2

2 Literature Review 3

2.1 Study on Public Speech Abroad 3

2.2 Study on Public Speech at Home 4

3 Stylistic Features of the Address 6

3.1 On the Lexical Level 6

3.2 On the Syntactical Level 8

3.2.1 The length of sentence 8

3.2.2 The type of sentence 9

3.3 On the Rhetorical Devices 11

3.3.1 Parallelism 11

3.3.2 Repetition 11

3.3.3 Simile and Metaphor 11

3.3.4 Rhetorical Question 12

4 Contextual Analysis 13

4.1 Field of discourse 13

4.2 Tenor of discourse 13

4.3 Mode of discourse 14

5 Conclusion 15

References 16

Acknowledgments 17

A Stylistic Research on President’s Address ——A case study of Obama’s Address

1 Introduction

1.1 Background and Objective of Study

Public speech can influence the way of people’s thinking through the communication to reach the purpose of addresser. The public speech given by the American president is especially eye-catching in the world. In the president’s address, the president should consider diversity of audiences who may come from different walks of life, such as scientist, businessman, housewife and blue collar workers. Obama is the first black president of America and also gains his second term. Obama’s excellent political ability and insight is the critical elements to boost his success, and his splendid and skilled public addresses also play a vital role to promote his success in his terms. Obama’s address has extremely strong inspiration, his languages are very sonorous and forceful with clear viewpoint. Moreover, the elegant and easy-to-understand language contained deep insight, shows his skillful capacity of using language. People can also get his excellent politics ability and personality charm in the address.

This paper will choose two Obama’s victory addresses in 2008 and 2012 and two inaugural addresses given in 2009 and 2013 as corpus. When Obama took office in 2009, America was hit by serious financial crisis and Americans were lack of confidence. In his second term, America’s supremacy was challenged and America suffered a series of terrorist crisis both at home and abroad. Therefore, under the situations Americans could feel the inspiration, courage and power from Obama’s victory addresses. (Showstack, 2012) Nowadays, the study of American president’s addresses can greatly improve EFL learners’ reading and writing abilities, and also help students to approach the American culture in an effective way.

1.2 Method of Study

Stylistics is a branch of linguistics which applies the theory and methodology of modern linguistics to the study of style. “It studies the use of language in specific contexts and attempts to account for the characteristics that mark the language use of individuals and social groups” (Li, 2009). The study will adopt a comprehensive, systemic perspective to analyze Obama’s victory and inaugural address from syntax, rhetoric and text structure. Moreover, data analysis will be adopted, such as the frequency of different sentence types and rhetorical devices. In this way, the study result will be more persuasive and realizable. The paper will take deeper analysis from practical and systemic characteristic of stylistics as well.

Burch and Tool (1988) wrote in the Style and fiction “... any practicable method of stylistics analysis must select some features and ignore others.” The basic framework of analyzing stylistic are “analysis, interpretation and evaluation”. So the analysis of stylistic features will focus on several factors below: analysis of the language features, computation of relevant frequencies of language features, contextualization—influence of the social factors to a language event. In order to find out the potential functions and powerful strength in Obama’s public addresses, the paper will also analyze the concept of tenor, field and mode, which let the readers read and understand the theories more convenient.

1.3 Structure of Paper

Besides the introduction part, chapter two mainly introduces the public address given by the American president, especially the significance and function of victory and inaugural addresses. This paper takes Obama’s four political addresses as corpus, analyzes their identities. Following chapter three introduces the research methods and theoretical foundation of the paper, in this chapter the paper will analyze the data collection and representative traditional features of stylistics. What’s more, chapter four analyzes Obama’s discourses from the field, tenor and mode particularly. The chapter five is the conclusion part which put forward the summary, state findings and research limitation of the paper, and also tries to give the suggestions for the future research.

2 Literature Review

Stylistics which under discussion in this paper is a branch of linguistics. There are two main subdivisions in modern stylistics—general stylistics and literary stylistics. The research scope of first one is much wider than the latter one. General stylistics is the subject that studies the styles of a text. To be specific, it is the reason why the speaker chooses the specific language structure, words and rhetorical devices rather than others, it studies various genres of literature which are fiction, drama and poetry. (Li, 2009). In the political speech, the politicians express their statements, win voters and beat competitors through public speeches, therefore, having a whole understanding of the characteristics and history of public speaking is necessary for the analysis of the US presidential political address in the following.

2.1 Study on Public Speech Abroad

There are some different understandings about the definition of public speech by scholars and professors in the speech field. Nevertheless, most scholars consider that the general definition as “a public speaker delivering a continuous speech before a large audience about his systemic suggestions and propositions in spoken language with the help of facial expression, sign and body gestures and the strong emotions, the purpose is to move, to courage, to persuade the audience or even to teach them something”. (Hao, 2010)