Genre Analysis Of American State Of The Union Addresses

Linguistic studies, for many newcomers in the field, always sound dry, abstruse and detached from real life. However, genre analysis, as an emerging discipline in linguistic studies, is demonstrating tremendous vitality with its keen concern for real world language usage and important pedagogical implications. In recent years, genre analysis is making increasing use of multidisciplinary tools and frameworks to study various types of human utterances.Nevertheless, there are relatively few writings in this regard on a unique genre of rhetorical speeches—the State of the Union addresses of the American presidents. This paper is an attempt fill in the gap.By taking Bhatia's multi-dimensional framework, the author examines the addresses of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush from four perspectives, textual, ethnographic, socio-cognitive and socio-critical. The author finds that this genre is typically realized with a four-move structure, each realized with different lexico-grammatical strategies. These textual features are grounded in the disciplinary culture of the discourse community, professional behavior of members of the community, as well as the large socio-cultural context.The thesis tries to pave the way for a holistic genre analysis of real world language usage. It demonstrates that, genres, as products of culture, should be treated as such so as to provide us with a thorough understanding of human utterances.