Stylistic Analysis Of Inaugural Addresses Of American Presidents

American Presidential Inaugural Address is an important variety of political publicspeech. Many researchers have already focused on the stylistic analysis of presidentialinaugural addresses; they are mostly qualitative researches, aiming at the exploration ofgeneral synchronic stylistic features of APIAs. Meanwhile, there are some quantitative studieson APIAs, but they focus on a certain aspect of stylistic analysis or a president. And most ofthese researches refer to a few rhetorical devices only briefly. This research aims at generalstylistic features of American presidential inaugural addresses and the linguistic changes ofAmerican presidential inaugural addresses from a diachronic perspective from thesedimensions: lexical level, syntactical level, textual level and also discusses rhetorical devicesused in presidential inaugural addresses.The56speeches are delivered by44American presidents from1789to2008. Byapplying theories of modern stylistics and based on the approach proposed by Crystal andDavy, the paper chooses10samples according to time intervals of24years from all thespeeches to analyze with detail from the dimensions of linguistic description, includinglexical level, syntactic level, and textual level as well rhetorical devices and their rhetoricaleffectiveness, and to reveal the general tendency that is reflected in the addresses.The major findings of this study are as follows:At the lexical level, hard words are frequently used; those early addresses employed lotsof hard words, and the mean of those Fog Indexes was very high; while the number of them issmall in these later addresses; these are showing a declining tendency on the whole. As fornominalization, because of the occasion’s formality, nominalization is often employed; thepercentage of nominalization was high in those early addresses, while it gets decreased inthese later addresses. So, presidents have been trying to make them more casual by employingfewer nominalizations. The first person pronouns are used the most in all the speeches, whichis a distinguishable feature of public speech. The usage of we or us refers to themselves andthe audience so as to shorten the psychological distance.At the syntactical level, the sentence length is long. In those addresses before1933, thelong sentences account for most part of the speech texts, while after1933, the long sentences get reduced, and short sentences account for the majority. The sentence length is gettinggradually short, Short sentences are closer to life and much easier to be understood. Thepresent tense dominates the tenses of the verbs in the addresses. The presidents need toanalyze the present situation and persuade the public to support their new policy. The multiplesentence patterns are frequently employed all the time. Most audience is native adults, and informal occasion, many meanings can be expressed clearly by multiple sentences.At the textual level, in terms of cohesive devices, references and conjunctions arefrequently used in each of the speeches. Discourse patterns include three parts: theintroduction, the body, the conclusion, and they are shared by these speeches though thecontents are not the same in the body part.There are some rhetoric devices used in these presidential speeches, such as parallelism,repetition, metaphor and simile, antithesis, rhetorical questions, etc. These devices arenecessary for making the speeches more vivid and attracting the audience’s attention.It is hoped that the present investigation on stylistic rhetorical devices of presidentialinaugural addresses will shed light on the writing skills of public speeches for addressers andwill be helpful for improving the English learners’ oral communication skills. And it is alsohelpful to us in teaching English writing in colleges.