A Stylistic Analysis Of US Secretary Of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's Speeches

As a branch of linguistics, Stylistics applies the theory and methodology of modern linguistics to the study of style and aims at revealing the expressive effect and the communicative function of language in specific context. Excellent speakers always have good skills and their public speeches on different subjects can be regarded as good examples for English learners to imitate and practice, and eventually achieve various communicative functions. Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State of America, is an outstanding speaker with decades of experience of international affairs. Her speeches are always full of wisdom and charm. So, it is worthwhile to discuss and analyze her public speeches systematically.Applying the theories and methodology of General Stylistics, General Linguistics and Social Linguistics, this thesis attempts to analyze the distinctive features of Hillary's speeches from different aspects with the selection of three samples, hoping that it will be beneficial for speakers to write speeches and improve English learners'spoken English.In order to reveal the distinguished stylistic features of Hillary's speeches, this thesis selects three speeches delivered on different occasions as corpora and mainly analyzes the stylistic characteristics from three dimensions:linguistic description, textual analysis as well as contextual analysis. In linguistic description, analysis is carried out from graphological, phonological, lexical, syntactic and rhetoric levels; textual analysis mainly focus on the structure and organization of the speeches; meanwhile, the paper also discusses the influence on speeches due to different subjects and occasions. The thesis intends to summarize Hillary's style with the method combining quantitative and qualitative analysis through analyzing a series of data and forms. This thesis attempts to make a summary of stylistic features of Hillary's speeches based on different functional needs and personalities, providing excellent samples for English learners and helping them make much more progress in English study.