Exploring The Perlocutionary Effect Through Figures Of Speech In Barack Obama's Speeches

Public speaking is an important means of displaying one's wisdom, eloquence and personal charm. As one subtype of public speaking, the purpose of political speeches is to arouse the interest and passion of the audience and persuade them to accept his political policy and take action to vote for the addresser. The American president Barack Obama's extraordinary ability to persuade and communicate finally aided him to win the election and become the president of America. Barack Obama has done this with great success by employing a great deal of figures of speech in his speeches to draw the audience's attention and make the language more vivid, emphatic and persuasive. Therefore, deep exploration and insights into Obama's wonderful addresses will be of great significance not only to our English learning and teaching but also to our acquisition of practical public speaking skills.According to Speech Act Theory (SAT) from pragmatic perspective, realization of the function of Barack Obama's speeches is to achieve the perlocutionay effect of Barack Obama's speeches. Based on the previous studies, this research aims to systematically analyze the frequently used figures of speech in Barack Obama's speeches according to the pragmatic theories of SAT and rhetoric. This study randomly selects 10 pieces of Barack Obama's speeches as research material and based on these data, this research makes a pragmatic analysis of the figures of speech in Barack Obama's speeches in an attempt to solve the following questions: (1) What is the distribution of frequently used figures of speech in Barack Obama's speeches and in what ways are they classified? (2) In what ways is the realization of perlocutionary effect of persuading achieved through the figures of speech in Barack Obama's speeches?Through careful analysis, the research discovers that the impact of the speeches greatly depends on the appropriate application of figures of speech; different kinds of figures of speech prevail in Barack Obama's speeches, especially parallelism. Among all the figures of speech, the frequency of syntactical figures of speech takes up the first place, phonetic figures of speech the second and lexical figures of speech the third. On many occasions, more than one figures of speech is employed to work together and each type of figures of speech is analyzed separately in this research is just for the reason of convenience. These figures of speech work in different ways to make the speeches more attractive and persuasive, which contribute a lot to Mr. Obama's winning the election.This thesis includes five parts.Chapter One is the introduction of the research. It presents the research motivation, research significance, research objectives and the organization of the research.Chapter Two reviews the related theories of the research. It includes the definitions and classifications of rhetoric, the functions and classifications of figures of speech, a brief introduction to Speech Act Theory and perlocutionary effect and a retrospect on the previous studies on political speeches at home and abroad.Chapter Three is concerned with the research questions, data selection, research method and procedures, and the working classification of figures of speech is also introduced in this chapter.Chapter Four is the key part of this research. Firstly, based on the theory of rhetoric and figures of speech, the frequency and distribution of all the frequently used figures of speech in Barack Obama's speeches are identified. Then the classification of those figures of speech from the three levels of phonetic, lexical and syntactical is presented with the support of the figure and the table. Secondly, a detailed analysis of each type of figures of speech is carried out from the above-mentioned three levels to investigate how those figures of speech realize the perlocutionary effect of persuading.Chapter five presents the conclusion of the research. It mainly summarizes the major findings of the research, presents the implications and limitations of the research. Besides, it also provides some suggestions for further studies.The research is a worthy application of Speech Act Theory and Rhetoric theories, which once again demonstrates their effectiveness and practicability. It is of practical significance to encourage more effective use of figures of speech in public speeches. Besides, it also helps English learners better understand public speeches and western culture, benefits the writing and teaching of public speaking as well.