Genre Analysis On English Political Speaking

The term "genre" is derived from the Latin word for "kind" or "class". It traditionally serves to indicate different kinds of literary and artistic works. In recent years, language educators and linguists have extended it to identify classes of language use and communication in all areas of life. Since 1970s, the focus in stylistics, text linguistics and syntactical features or formats of discourse has been transformed into a deeper and multi-layered explanation of the macro-structures and communicative functions of discourse, and thus genre analysis emerges and becomes an important branch of discourse analysis.There are two major schools in the field of linguistics concerning the concept "genre" — the Swalesian School with the representatives of John M. Swales and Vijak K. Bhatia, and the Australian School with the representative of Jim R. Martin. This paper is a tentative endeavor to put the genre analysis theory into practice, and carries out an analysis of English Political Speaking within the framework established by Bhatia.Bhatia's cognitive structuring model integrates sociology, psychology and linguistics with genre study;and thus possesses a strong explanatory power over discourses. Discourse patterns, according to Bhatia, are cognitive in nature in the sense that they are available to members of a particular discourse community. And the cognitive structure is composed of moves, which are in turn realized through strategies. The cognitive nature of genre is also displayed through strategies that genre-users select to accomplish their private intentions.Based on Bhatia' framework, the paper analyzes 40 English political speeches which are collected from four anthologies of public speeches. This paper aims to summarize the cognitive structure of EPS, to investigate the strategies which speakers choose to convey their communicative purposes, and to uncover linguistic realization of moves and strategies. Generally speaking, genre analysis operates with three aspects: communicative purpose;identification of obligatory identical move—to capture the structure of the genre;rhetorical strategies for the linguistic realization of moves.It is assumed that the research findings can promote the understanding of howwriters or speakers select strategies to achieve their communicative purpose within the constraints imposed by the genre to which that discourse' belongs. This study is of certain value in instructing how to be a good English public speaker and how to be an effective communicator in English. It is also of help in teaching English listening, speaking and writing.