From Washington To Obama

Generally recognized is the importance of public speaking in the western countries, especially in the countries with the parliamentary political system. The American President, one of the most influential people in the world, delivers the inaugural address as the commencement of a new term, which also marks an opportunity for the newly elected president to announce national policies, unify the public and win over their support. The political and social significance of the American Presidential Inaugural Addresses (APIAs) can never be exaggerated. Meanwhile, as a unique corpus, APIAs also have a high linguistic value in that its composition is a combination of many talents out of careful deliberation.The corpus of this research consists of 56 inaugural addresses with a time span of over 220 years from the first American President George Washington to the current one Barack Obama. This thesis does a corpus analysis on the basis of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) theories, which is a relatively new academic spectrum focusing on language and power. Originally deriving from M.A.K. Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, CDA regards language as a social practice inseparable from the social structure, one important part of which is the ideology as the superstructure. CDA explores the ways power and domination are expressed, enacted and reproduced by text and talk in the areas of gender, race, media, politics and other social domains.The corpus analysis of the present research consists of two parts:1, Analysis on the content of APIAs to explore the power and dominance behind language:the context control of APIAs places the public in the position of passively accepting the information; the president emphasizes on the national traditional values and mention his predecessors to establish his authority; they also parody the Biblical language and religious concepts to exert a subtle influence on the ideology of the public. This proves the inequality behind language and the control of the government represented by the president over the public. 2, Analysis on the linguistic features to track the diachronical changes of the APIAs: quantitative statistics and diachronical comparison show that along with the elapse of time, APIAs are taking the trend of using shorter word length and sentence length, less nominalization and passivization, and fewer formal words. Although APIAs remain the formal style at all times, they are taking a development trend of becoming more and more conversational in terms of the linguistic presentations. In addition, there shows an increase in the use of first-person plural forms, together with a slight rise in using high-value modal auxiliary verbs. In this way, the president expresses his determination and willingness to work closely with his citizens.It seems that the trend of becoming conversational shortens the distance between the president and the public, and the use of first-personal plurals unite the president and the public together, compounded by the phenomenon that the use of modal verbs expresses the nationwide willingness and commitment to work together. But what lies deep underneath such surfaces is the fact that power, control and dominance still exist in the addresses, as analyzed in the first part. A combination of the above two parts leads to the conclusion of this thesis that inequality and power dominance exist as ever before, but its manifestation is turning from explicit to implicit, which is easier to reinforce the power difference and exert control over the public ideology.