A Tentative Study Of The Speech Acts Of Obama's Race Speeches For 2008 American President Election

The American Politician's Speeches have been attracting public attention, especially linguists'attention because of their powerful influence. In the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Barack Obama is particularly paid attention to. It can be known from Barack Obama's race speeches that he is a distinguished speaker. His speech involves rhythmic, full flavor and appropriate tone. It is the outstanding strategy of his speaking that helps him to be the 44th President of America, and his speech has also become a model of political speech. Since then, many scholars have analyzed Obama's Race Speeches from various perspectives, such as: language skills, interpersonal function, style analysis and so on, while few of studies on political speech in the field of Speech Act Theory have been carried out.Speech Act Theory refers to the theory of an act performed by people to use a language in the specific context of language for the realization of the purpose of communication. In this paper, based on Austin's and Searle's classification of Speech Act Theory, Motsch's assumption (illocutionary act's hierarchical structure is the base of the analysis to the description in discourse from the theory of verbal behavior) and Van Dijk's Macro-Structure theory, the author has analyzed 9 main race speeches of Barack Obama's, trying to build Pragmatic Macro-Structure Model of speech acts in a discourse and reveal the principle of speech acts composing the overall composite speech acts.Based on the analysis of the available data, it was found that:Firstly, each speech of Obama's has four "illocutionary acts", including "assertives", "commissives", "expressives" and "directives" which are mainly performed by the combination of personal pronoun and modal verb. When performing the "illocutionary acts", the speakers all take both direct and indirect ways, thinking over the relation between the speaker and the addressees and the specific context of the topic;Secondly, each speech has a main or dominating macro-speech-act, called "directive" or "indirect directive". In order to perform the "directives" successfully, the speaker will always perform other subsidiary speech acts in advance, like "assertives", "commissives" and "expressives", to create conditions, build scenes and express hints etc. And then there are three types of hierarchical structure of illocutionary acts in Obama's 9 Race Speeches, which are assertives used as chief speech acts, commissives used as chief speech acts and expressives used as chief speech acts.Finally, there are four models of Pragmatic Macro-speech-act in Obama's 9 Race Speeches, including the model of problem-solution, the model of plan-need, the model of refutation-centered and the model of thanks-centered.This thesis has been concentration on studying of political speech in the field of SAT, expanding the applications of the theory. The practical value of the study lies in helping people understand political speech better and improving their skills of verbal communication.