An Analytical Study On Discourse Coherence In U.S President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

On the inauguration day, the U. S.presidential inaugural address is a kind of political public speech which makes a statement at home and abroad. It has a great effect on the American political life.It completely reports the new president’s fundamental policies and governing principle on politics, economy, military and diplomacy. The main goal is to encourage the people to get support and to set up the new president’s political power. Thus, this type of speech turns into the hot points of linguistics.Linguists set about to analyze the characteristic of this discourse from the fields of style, rhetoric, pragmatics genre, etc. It’s also the Public hotspots of many speech enthusiast who want to learn its speech methods.Gill Fauconnier is an American cognitive psychologist who first presents conceptual integration is a branch of cognitive psychology.His four spaces’model has been broadly used in many different kinds of parts of linguistic researches.The purpose of this thesis is to try to manage to use Conceptual Integration Theory into explaning how coherence in discourse is set up in order to research the operating mechanism after the coherence in discourse. To lead an actively and cognitive explanation of discourse coherence by the viewpoints of Conceptual Integration Theory is that the central content and main work of this paper.With the usage of conceptual integration theory, in the fourth section the writer mainly discusses and explains the discourse coherence from the following three fields:the Emotion Excitement of conceptual integration, the assessable role of conceptual integration, coherence built by the shared cultural context both the addresser and addressee.The conclusion that can be drawn from the study is that using Conceptual Integration Theory is enough to interpret discourse coherence.This is a tentative research about the analysis of discourse coherence in the presidential inaugural addresses. Further research must be done and studied in this field. Therefore, it is expected that more and more researchers could be involved in the Conceptual Integration Theory and discourse coherence.