Public speech is a kind of speech where you use strategies to express your views in public, which plays an essential role in selling, election, especially in crisis-solving, be it the economic crisis, the war crisis, or disaster crisis. This speech aims at convincing the listeners to agree with you and take actions in order. Throughout history, many celebrities have given famous speeches in public to solve the crisis, such as Franklin Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, Ronald Reagan, especially Winston Churchill, who gave a large quantity of speeches in history, which had a profound and lasting effect on society, some helping the evacuation for soldiers in Dunkirk during the difficult time, some encouraging people stuck in the war. Thus there are many studies both from home and abroad about this kind of speech and the strategies in it.

The strategies in crisis-solving speech are vital to help speaker achieve his goal. There are many strategies in this kind of speech, such as emotional appeals, credibility, seriousness and so on. The speaker can also give specific examples to make the speech easy to understand. The use of these strategies can help speaker deliver a successful speech. Due to the reversal effect of the crisis-solving speech, the study on the strategies of this kind of speech is quite necessary. For instance, Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural speech encouraged the desperate people a lot by using some good strategies and took them out of the great depression in 1933 ultimately. So public speech has vital significance in reversing the situation.

There are many studies about the strategies’ functions in crisis-solving speech both from home and abroad. For example, the essay, The Rhetorical Analysis of Obama’s Presidential Campaign Speeches, focuses on analyzing the rhetorical strategies in Obama’s Presidential Campaign Speeches. The findings demonstrate the importance of strategies in speech. He successfully won the vote and became the first African-American president in American history by using strategies in his speech. The domestic research on Mao Tse-tung’s speech also tells us the importance of strategies in crisis-solving speech. His speech, Serve the People(1944), managed to encourage people to be united and fight with Japanese invaders during the Anti-Janpanese War.

This paper focuses on Rhetoric Strategies for Crisis-solving in Winston Churchill’s speeches and the significance of these strategies. By using some good strategies in his speeches, Churchill helped over 330 thousand soldiers evacuate from Dunkirk during the World War Ⅱ, and succeeded to persuade people all over the world to build a united front and discard different political ideas and way of thinking to resist the Nazi. This paper analyzes these strategies from four aspects, including, words, semantics, emotional appeals and rhetoric. So the topic in this paper can help the speaker get more useful strategies from Winston Churchill who has given many successful speeches in history.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

This paper analyzes the types of strategies in English speech, especially in Winston Churchill's speeches, and the significance of these strategies. There are six parts in this paper. Firstly, this paper will introduce the strategies which help Winston Churchill achieve his goal, including words, semantics, emotional appeals and rhetoric. The next four parts will introduce the significance of these strategies in details. In the second part, this paper will explain the basic definition of emotional appeals and its significance in Winston Churchill’s speech. In the third and fourth part, the importance of words and semantics will be illustrated with examples. After that, this paper analyzes the function of rhetoric in Winston Churchill’s speech. In this part many examples will be given to exemplify the significance of rhetoric in Churchill’s speech to encourage the public and solve the crisis. Finally, the conclusion part emphasizes the vital function and significance of strategies in Churchill’s successful speech. What's more, the research methods adopted in this paper mainly include: literary research method, investigation method and comparison analysis method.

[1] Jensen, K. Rhetorical counteraction in Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives and The War of Words[J]. Quarterly Journal of Speech，2018(4) :348-399