A Study Of Rhetorical Structure Among American Presidents' Inaugural Speeches

Each American president will make an inaugural speech at the inauguration day before entering on the execution of the office of the presidency. On one hand, the president will grasp this chance to put forward public policies in different areas to maintain social stability, ethnic unity and diplomatic contact, and to stimulate the ecomomy which will later become the criteria of his success; on the other hand, being a representative of his party, the president will propagate beliefs behind his party to persuade more people support his government and party.This thesis studies the rhetorical relations among Abraham Lincoln's, F.D. Roosevelt's and Barack Obama's inaugural speeches, based on the Rhetorical Structure Theory which is proposed by William Mann and Sandra Thompson. The main aim of this study is to explore the frequency of rhetorical relations, span orders about such kind of political speeches.The number of the total textual materials includes 27 paragraphs. The analytical steps of the three inaugural speeches are as follows:First, paragraphs related to the social background and policies in economic, political, ethnic, and diplomatic areas are selected; The next step in analyzing these selected paragraphs is to divide paragraphs into units and identify rhetorical relations and span orders; Then the tree diagrams which demonstrate the rhetorical relations of these paragraphs are drawn; Finally, the statistics about the rhetorical relations are analyzed. The main findings are:firstly, Joint, Elaboration and Justify are the most frequently used relations in the three inaugural speeches. The functions and effects of these three rhetorical relations determine their high frequency in persuasive and eloquent inaugural speeches:Joint can be used to form a comprehensive and complete speech; Elaboration can be used to provide additional information for the nucleus; Justify can be used to argue for some viewpoint. Secondly, forward arrows appear more frequently than backward arrows in the selected paragraphs which verifies the American and British's preference to the principle of "where the argument is going", that is, the American and British like to present their central ideas first then put forward proofs and evidences afterwards.The implications about rhetorical relations are expected to be used to teach how to produce eloquent, coherent, persuasive speeches. Specifically, ESL teachers have to enable students to be aware of the rhetorical style of English speeches delivered by native speakers in order to enable students to produce eloquent, persuasive and coherent public speeches.