Intertextuality Analysis Of American President Barack Obama's Victory Speech And Inaugural Address

This thesis aims to examine intertextuality in American President Barack Obama's Victory Speech and Inaugural Address. It sorts out eleven types of intertextuality and analyses how they are employed to make the two speeches forceful and persuasive, and the characteristics of the two speeches.Intertextuality refers to the relationship between a particular text with other texts which share characteristics with it. As an efficient linguistic form, speakers often resort to the use of different intertextual relationships to fulfill their communicative purposes. Based on the typology of intertextuality proposed by Hatim & Mason, this thesis identifies five types of manifest intertextuality and six types of constitutive intertextuality which are commonly present in Obama's two speeches.The significance of this research lies in the following three aspects.Firstly, it is conductive to the studies of intertextuality on political speeches. Previous studies of intertextuality done in this field are rare and problematic.Secondly, the presidents'victory speeches have long been neglected while the inaugurals have always been concerned and analyzed.Thirdly, comparative study of one president's victory speech and his inaugural address is rare. As the author has mentioned in the above aspect, the relationship of the two speeches is well worthy of studying.Detailed analysis reveals that Obama's Victory Speech and Inaugural Address, the two most important speeches of a president, are intertextual to each other. They bear the similarities in themes, clichés, conventionalism, quotations, genres, structure, rhetorical devices, etc. In other words, they are closely related in content and style. Analysis also offers a new perspective of studying the characteristics of public speeches and provides a set of skills of making eloquent and elegant speeches.