Contractive Stylistic Analysis Of Inaugural Speech And Academic Speech

People always put a high value on public speeches because it has been a vital means of communication. Scholars both at home and abroad have paid attention to various public speeches. Based on the previous studies, this thesis ventured to do research on the sub-genre of public speech:inaugural speech and academic speech.Inaugural speech and academic speech are two important sub-genres of public speech. However, they have different speech content and purposes. The language of inaugural speech is persuasive, encouraging and appealing. While academic speech is usually to communicate or introduce the knowledge of science and technology, including the lectures, seminars, academic reports and academic reviews in universities or conferences. Language serves for communication; as a result, both similar and different stylistic points exist between these two kinds of speeches.The sample texts consist of William J. Clinton’s second inaugural speech, George W. Bush’s first inaugural speech, Barack Obama’s inaugural speech, William Ehrman, Peter Piot and Bill Gate’s academic speeches. This thesis employs the theory of modern stylistics and the approach of stylistic analysis to make a careful study on the language features from linguistic description (including phonological, lexical, syntactical and semantic analysis), textual and contextual aspects. It employs the methods of textual analysis and contrastive analysis, applies the ways of statistics and computation as well as tables to confirm that the choices of speech language are determined by particular context. It is hoped that the present investigation on stylistic features of the inaugural speeches and the academic speeches will shed light on the writing skills for addressers and will be helpful for improving the English learner’s oral communication skills.