| In the 2008 American presidential election, Obama, an African American, was nominated as a candidate for the first time. The author collects his election speeches to form a corpus named as OSC (Obama Speeches Corpus). This study combines qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis to give a systematic lexical analysis of OSC. The study uses the WordSmith Tools to extract the key words in OSC with BROWN as a reference corpus. The analysis is divided into three parts.First, the study concentrates on the personal pronouns, modal verbs and connectives appearing in the key words list of OSC, and tries to find out how Obama uses them to realize their interpersonal functions.Second, the key words can be divided into positive key words and negative key words according to their frequencies. In part two, the positive key words, which occur more often in comparison with BROWN, are the focus, and they are analyzed from grammatical perspective, that is, they are divided into nouns, verbs and adjectives. Because nouns occupy a very large part in the positive key words, so they are further divided into different categories according to their semantic meanings.Finally, the author picks out the unique words appearing in the positive key words list of OSC only for analysis. It tries to explain the reason why they occur in OSC only, and get their exact meanings through analyzing their collocates.This thesis is an effort to give a lexical analysis of OSC on the basis of the corpus-based method. Limitations must exist and they should be improved in the future study.
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