A Study Of Iconicity In Obama's Political Speeches

Political speech is an important form of public speaking.Politicians,especially those well-known politicians use the political speech as a weapon to interpret their political ideas,state the party's political platforms,propaganda the masses and refute their political opponents.As the 44 th,as well as the 45 th first African-American president of the United States,Barack Obama has received a high degree of attention from the United States and the world.Many scholars have studied Obama's political speeches from different perspectives,including metaphor,rhetoric,pragmatic strategies and so on.This thesis attempts to analyze Obama's political speeches based on iconicity theory in cognitive linguistics.As one of the attributes of language opposite to arbitrariness proposed by Saussure,iconicity is an important part of cognitive linguistics.The iconicity of language refers to the consistency between a linguistic form and the meaning it expresses.With the development of the study of iconicity,linguists have summed up some iconicity principles including distance iconicity,quantity iconicity,sequence iconicity,markedness iconicity and so on.These iconicity principles reveal the consistent relationship between the signifier and the signified.The thesis attempts to analyze Obama's political speeches under quantity iconicity,sequence iconicity and distance iconicity,aiming to figure out whether iconicity exists widely in Obama's political speeches;what role iconicity plays in Obama's political speeches as well as how it works in them;Which iconicity principle is used most among the three iconicity principles.Through the study of concrete examples of Obama's political speeches,it is evident that iconicity exists widely in Obama's political speeches.Through using repetition and complex sentences and arranging the distance of linguistic elements,Obama achieves different speech effects and political goals.Meanwhile,the different sequence of language expressions in Obama's political speeches can manifest that language imitates human thoughts and human experience.Besides,two representative Obama political speeches are chosen to calculate the proportion of the three iconicity principles used in Obama's political speeches.From the results,it can be found that quantity iconicity is used most by Obama.The application of iconicity to the analysis of Obama's political speeches equips readers with the awareness of iconicity,so as to help them possess a new perspective to understand and appreciate political speeches.