Stylistic Analysis Of Inaugural Addresses Of American Presidents

As an art of spoken language, public speeches came into being with the existence of man, and have developed with the development of society. American presidential candidates run for the presidency mainly through their speeches to give wide publicity of their political standpoints, to let people know them and to win support. Over two hundred years, from George Washington to George W. Bush, the Presidents expressed their best wishes and heroic dreams, and displayed their rare gifts, bold strategies as well as administrative programmes through inaugural speeches. And the speeches were decently written by a group of American well-known men of letters or talented "speech writers" with well-knit logic, rhythmic and sonorous tone. Therefore, these speeches are not merely the Presidents' administrative programmes, but one of the important ways to demonstrate their personal charm. At the same time, they are full of flowery language, thus having aesthetic value.The selected materials are from the 37 American Presidents' 55 inaugural speeches from 1789 to 2005. This thesis is conducted through documents analysis and contents analysis, aiming at confirming the author's three hypotheses as follows. First, the choices of speech language are determined by the particular context with both features of spoken and written language. Second, public speeches differ greatly from ordinary speeches or even everyday conversation. They are delivered for a special purpose, in a special way, and on a special occasion. They are, therefore, often well-prepared, well-composed and well-expressed with unique characteristics. Third, these speeches, spanning over two centuries, must have some language changes as the society develops and time goes by.Bearing these hypotheses in mind, the author studies the materials mainly based on modern stylistics and stylistic analysis method proposed or developed by Halliday, Leech, Short etc., and language change theory by Aitchison, Labov etc. This thesis is conducted from three dimensions: linguistic description, textual analysis, and contextual analysis. To be specific, the author conducts the thesis in the following 5 aspects: lexical features, syntactic features, figures of speech, contextual structure analysis as well as language change. After careful analyses and research, the author substantiates the propositions as follows. First, language is a meaning potential and the use of language is to make choices from this potential. The choice is made according to the situation type in which language is used. The effectiveness of the speeches is mostly decided by how the speakers understand the field of discourse, the tenor of discourse, and the mode of discourse. Second, there are a lot of infectious and colorful words in the speeches as well as rhetorical devices such as metaphor, parallelism, repetition, which makes these speeches clearer, more vivid and forceful. Meanwhile, a lot of abstract words exist to make speeches more sacred and solemn. The language skills adopted by speakers are to achieve certain purposes and so, their language features are closely related to certain occasions. Third, one important aspect of language is that it is never stagnant. It is constantly changing to accommodate the society it serves. For these speeches which span over two centuries, their language styles change with time flying and social development. And language evolves as a result of internal forces and external forces as well.