Rhetorical Analysis Of Obama’s Inaugural Address From The Perspective Of Kenneth Burke’s New Rhetoric

This thesis is intended to constuct a framework for rhetorical analysis of Obama’s Inaugural Address from the perspective of Kenneth Burke’s new rhetoric. The focus of the study is to reveal the rhetorical process of public speech discourse and rhetorical motives embodied in the discourse.Discourse analysis, as a study of language use beyond the sentence boundary, has been an increasingly popular and important area of study. Arising out of a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, psychology and anthropology, discourse analysis has developed into a variety of approaches motivated by a wide range of interests and orientations. Six different ways adopted to do discourse analysis are speech-act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis and variation analysis. There are some other approaches such as the systematic-functional approach, the critical linguistics approach, the cognitive approach, the literary approach and so on. There is such a vast range of approaches to discourse analysis. Yet, up to now, to my limited knowledge, there has been little attempt to do discourse analysis on presidential inaugurals systematically from the perspective of Burkean new rhetoric, although rhetoric, a long-established tradition of communication since the days of ancient Greece, is widely claimed as the origin of discourse study. New rhetoric has been largely neglected in discourse analysis and text linguistics. This is why we single out the subject for discussion in this thesis.In this thesis, Burke’s ideas of new rhetoric are studied from3aspects:rhetoric of identification, dramatism, and logology, which constitute three dimensions of the framework proposed. Identification analysis focuses on three major identification strategies: identification by sympathy, identification by antithesis, and identification by inaccuracy. These strategies are often employed in political speech to move the speech audience to identify with the speaker and the speech content. In dramatistic analysis, the discourse of political speech is analyzed in terms of ratios of act, agent, agency, scene and purpose, demonstrating the speaker’s motive of influencing the audience. With the vocabulary of logological analysis of political speech on inaugurals, studies show the discourse constructs hierarchy, creates principle of perfection and marks mystery to drive the audience to identify with the speech.The significance of our study lies in both theoretical and practical values. Theoretically speaking, it has introduced a new perspective, that is, Kenneth Burke’s new rhetoric into the rhetorical critique of Obama’s inaugural address, thus opens up new possibilities for the study of inaugurals. Meanwhile, it equips the critics with a tool to analyze the ways in which language systems describe and influence human motives, and to understand how language supplies knowledge, motive and identity, and shapes human relations. Therefore, the comprehension on the rhetorical discourse can be enhanced; the consciousness of communication can be strengthened; and the communicative strategies can be improved.