A Study Of Cohesive Devices In Obama's Addresses

Since the publication of "Cohesion in English" in 1976, the concept of cohesion has become the concentration of scholars in many fields because of its importance. In this paper, the author tends to analysis the cohesive devices of the 44th American president-Obama's addresses with the consideration of the contribution of cohesion.The study of cohesive devices of Obama's addresses is mainly based on the theory of cohesion put forward by Halliday and his wife Hasan. And the analysis is done with instances of various types of cohesive devices in a corpus of Obama's addresses. The tool as ANTCONC has been applied to locate those words and count their frequency. And the quantitative study is mainly done with the assistance of statistic software SPSS 11.0. The whole study goes on in both qualitative and quantitative perspectives.The analysis of the data from the corpus shows that only a few cohesive ties are realized by reference, ellipsis and substitution, and conjunction. The task of realizing cohesion so as to facilitate coherence attribution in the readers'or listeners'mind mainly falls upon lexical cohesion. Compared with the using of ellipsis and substitution, the using of reference and conjunction shares a higher frequency. As a result of the need of speakers to tell the readers or listeners the person, place, distance and even the condition of things mentioned. And the relation of conjunction also plays a dispensable role in text, although there may be not as high frequency as reference. With conjunctives, relation of sentences as additive, adversative, causal, and temporal becomes natural and smooth. These findings may help the students of English to get a better interpretation of presidential addresses. What's more, it is the author's wish that this study can have an implication for the future of English teaching.