A Stylistic Analysis Of The Nobel Prize Presentation Speech In Literature

Nobel Prize presentation speech, as an important sociocultural phenomenon of the West, is a special ceremonial manuscript delivered at a certain award ceremony to appraise the prize-winners'achievements. Listening to these speeches, the audience will not only get acquainted with the prize-winners'feat but also be fascinated by their magnetic personality. It is the skillful use of language that provides crowning touch to the presentation speech. With worldwide influence and long-lasting significance, presentation speech has served as an important functional variety. The analysis of its stylistic features broadens the scope of the stylistic study of public speaking, facilitates English learners in appreciating presentation speech thoroughly, enhances their language skills of public speaking and improves their English reading and writing ability.Based on the general stylistic theory, this thesis aims to reveal the stylistic features of Nobel Prize presentation speech in literature in an all-round way. The study proceeded from diachronic perspective in the interest of reflecting language changes in the past one hundred years. Meanwhile, BROWN Corpus was adopted to compare with NPPSLC, because only in this way can the results be more convincing. The analysis generally adhered to the following three steps: Linguistic Description--- Interpretation--- Evaluation from the lexical, syntactic, semantic levels as well as contextual factors analysis.The major findings of this thesis are as follows: lexically, the average word length in Nobel Prize presentation speech in literature is relatively longer, the percentage of favorable adjectives accounts for a large amount, the use of hard words and third person pronouns is more frequent, but the fog index is on the decrease; syntactically, the average sentence length reduce gradually, declarative sentences and simple present tenses appear frequently; semantically, rhetoric devices make the speeches vivid, forceful and effective; contextually, Nobel Prize presentation speech in literature is characteristic of formal written language while exhibiting features of spoken language. It is mainly treated as a written language.