A Stylistic Study Of American Presidential Inaugural Address

Stylistics is a branch of linguistics that studies language style. The goal of most stylistics is not simply to describe the formal features of text for their own sake, but in order to show their functional significance for the interpretation of the text; or in order to relate possible meanings or effects to linguistics "causes" where these are felt to be relevant. Theories and schools of modern linguistics are various; this results in various theories and schools of stylistics. Functional stylistics advocated by M. A. K. Halliday has been prevailing since the 1970s. It stresses the relationship between the text and the context of situation, and advocates studying the style in the social-cultural context.English public political speaking is an important social-cultural phenomenon of the West. It is one that the speaker, usually on behalf of a certain class, society, or party, makes to an audience on some important matters and relationships at home and abroad. American presidential inaugural address is a-sub-component of the public political speaking. It is delivered to the people at home and abroad, when the newly elected president takes office. In these addresses the speakers are expected to make his government policy known to the public and to persuade the public to accept and support his policy. With worldwide influence and long-lasting significance, American presidential address is an important functional variety. The analysis of its stylistic features cannot only broaden the scope of the stylistic study of the public political speaking, but can also help the readers better appreciate the inaugural address, develop language skills of public speaking learners, and it is also helpful to us in teaching English reading and writing in college.This dissertation, mainly based on Halliday's functional stylistic theories, especially his theories of context and foregrounding, aims to reveal the stylistic features of the American presidential inaugural address. In order to reflect the characteristics of modern English, and to ensure the reliability and convenience ofthe analysis, the corpuses of this dissertation are ten American presidential inaugural addresses after World War II. The analysis is mainly based on M. A. K. Halliday's functional stylistic theories, but in detailed analysis at the lexical level, syntactic level, rhetorical level, and textual level, it also employs some other commonly accepted contemporary linguistic theories. The analysis generallyfollows the following three steps: Description (mainly linguistic)InterpretationEvaluation. Systematic investigation of the linguistic data is a characteristic ofthis dissertation. Because of the close relation between speech skills and rhetorical devices, the analysis at the rhetorical level is the emphasis of this dissertation.The analysis reveals the following stylistic features of American presidential inaugural address: First, determined by its context of situation, American presidential address contains many abstract nouns; the frequently used tenses in it are the simple present, perfect present and future simple. American presidential address is characteristic of formal written language while exhibiting features of spoken language. It is mainly treated as a written language. Second, the speakers make good use of language skills to make their speeches vivid, forceful and effective. These language skills include the first-person plural, adjectives with emotional color,variety of sentence, and suitable rhetorical devices. Third, influenced by its social, cultural background, the American presidential inaugural addresses possess much religious color. And semantically, there are some hollow words in the inaugural addresses, which is the product of the emotional appeal.