Study On The Realization Of Directives In The American Presidential Inaugural Addresses

Directives, as one of the typical phenomena in human communication, have beenone of the essential concerns of linguists and philosophers. Meanwhile, it is animportant research topic in Austin and Searle’s speech act study. Basing on Austin andSearle’s speech act theory, there are many researches done on directives from theperspective of illocutionary act, social act, as well as other different pragmatic fieldswhere directives are applied.As an indispensable part of American political affairs, American presidentialinaugural address plays an essential role, when the newly elected president publiclyannounces in the inauguration his administrative program and convinces the public toaccept and support his viewpoints. Of all the speech acts performed by the inauguraladdresses in the inaugural addresses, directives enjoy a great proportion. Specifically,American presidential inaugural address belongs to the political speech whose genreor style requires it to be clear, distinctive and inspiring.Since the context in which the directive is performed has great importance forthe performance and effect, it is very prominent for the linguistic researchers to studydirectives within a specific context or a setting. In this thesis, directives are studiedunder the specific genre and social context of the inaugural addresses made by theAmerican presidents. After a quantitative and qualitative research, it is found thatdirectives in the inaugural addresses turn out to have some unique linguisticcharacteristics.The present study applies Austin and Searle’s speech act theory in the analysis ofdirectives in the American presidential inaugural addresses. Specifically, this researchis an empirical study, adopting qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze all thetypes of directives in the selected American presidential inaugural addresses as theanalysis data. Due to the special political context of American presidential inauguraladdresses, directives in the inaugural addresses contain three types of directives,namely, direct directives, conventional indirect directives and non-conventionalindirect directives.For direct directives in the inaugural addresses, they are realized by means ofperformative verbs and imperative sentences. For conventional indirect directives inthe inaugural addresses, they have less dependence on the context. Although there is neither explicit performative verb of directives, nor the syntactic structure ofimperative sentences, the illocutionary force of directives has been produced by otherlinguistic devices in such directives. For non-conventional indirect directives in theAmerican presidential inaugural addresses, they have more dependence on the context,thus, in order to understand such directives, exploration on some specific contexts arenecessary.To sum up, the present study grounded on the selected American presidentialinaugural addresses, has applied speech act theory to the practical research ofexploring directives in the American presidential inaugural addresses to analyze therealization of different types of directives in such specific political context. This is anew perspective to study directives and the language in the American presidentialinaugural addresses, thus it may hold some practical value to illustrate directives asthe unique linguistic characteristics of the American presidential inaugural addressesas well as lighting some significance on the study of other political speeches.