A Study Of FL In American Presidential Inaugural Address

The formulaic language is a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words orother elements, which is or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrievedwhole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation oranalysis by the language grammar. Since the1970s, the formulaic language hasattracted great attention from scholars in different domains at home and abroad. Thestudy of formulaic language is mainly involved in psychology, society, and discourse.Among these domains, the investigation of formulaic language in discourse domain isbecoming more and more popular. The inaugural address is a particular type ofdiscourse. The inaugural address is an important part of U.S inauguration. Theinaugural addresses not only indicate the political views and sights of each presidentand display each president‘s ambition, wisdom as well as boldness, but also possess thecharacter of activating group memories and strengthening cultural identity. Thelanguage choice of address is influenced by social environment and ideology, so it is aminiature of American history. Based on the corpus of57American inauguraladdresses from President Washington to President Obama, this thesis adopts the methodof combing quantitative study and qualitative analysis under the theory of ideology inorder to explore the language manifestation of ideologies hidden in inaugural addresses.Under the categories classified by Lewis, we take the software Antconc3.2.1w to solvethe next three questions:1) what are the general features of formulaic language in theinaugural addresses?2) How does the formulaic language in the inaugural addressesreflect ideology?3) What ideologies are realized through the identified formulaiclanguage in the addresses? The study results show that:(1) There are299four-word formulaic language extracted from the corpus.According to the rate of total number, the ranking of four categories of formulaiclanguage is collocations (126), poly-words (114), sentence frames and heads (33) andinstitutionalized utterances (26). Based on four categories of formulaic language, thefrequency rate of formulaic language of each category in all the formulaic language isranked as collocations (42%), poly-words (38%), sentence frames and heads (11%) andinstitutionalized utterances (8%). The percentage of four categories of formulaiclanguage indicates that American presidents tend to use poly-words and collocations.These poly-words and collocations have been the common sense of inaugural addresses and a typical culture in America.(2) The formulaic language in four categories has features. The poly-words areconstituted by two categories. One category is Proper Nouns, such as the United Statesand the Federal Government. The other category is fixed phrases, such as on the otherhand and at the same time. The collocations are composed of four structural types,Noun phrase with "of" phrase fragment, of with Noun phrase fragment, Verb withNoun fragment and other structures. The institutionalized utterances include twocategories: institutionalized utterances with first-person possessive form our/my andinstitutionalized utterances without our/my. There are five categories in sentence framesand heads. The five categories are sentence frames and heads led by first-person subjectI, sentence frames and heads led by first-person plural We, sentence frames and headsled by There, sentence frames and heads led by It and sentence frames and heads led bywhich.(3) The results of qualitative analysis are summarized as follows. The fourcategories of formulaic language reflect different ideologies. In the poly-words, theProper Nouns directly manifest the ideology of nationalism. The collocations canconvey ideologies whey they are combined with context. For instance, the ideology ofpopulism is indirectly conveyed by the structure type of Noun phrase with of‘‘phrasefragment. In institutionalized utterances, the institutionalized utterances withfirst-person possessive form our/my show the ideology of homecentrism by pragmatictransformation. And in the sentence frames and heads, the sentence frames and headswith biblical feature reflect the ideology of religious nationalism. So the formulaiclanguage of each category reflects some ideologies to a certain degree, includingnationalism, populism and American civil religion and religious nationalism. Theformulaic language with some kind of ideological tendency has become the commonsense. Once formulaic language with some kind of ideological tendency hidden in theaddress has become a component of background knowledge, they tend to produce theimperceptible effect and make the listener unconsciously affected by it or accept it. Theideologies the formulaic language reflected and the ways they reflected have theattribute of variety. They are visibility and invisibility; direct and indirect. This isconnected with the features of formulaic language themselves. The research findingsnot only provide a valuable reference for the functional study of formulaic language,but also give light to the language acquisition.