A Study Of The Realization Of Illocutionary Forces In Inspirational Speeches From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

As a genre of public speaking, campus inspirational speech plays an important role in campus culture with its unique feature, which undertakes the schools’ expectations as well as wishes to the students. The study of public speaking reaches its peak in the early years of the20th century. It has been studied by many linguists from the perspectives of traditional grammar analysis, content analysis, stylistic analysis, critical analysis as well as systemic functional analysis. The majority of the studies mainly center on political speeches, but little attention is attached to inspirational speeches. Therefore, it is meaningful to conduct a study on English inspirational speech discourse. On the basis of the Speech Act Theory studied by Austin and Searle, this thesis carries out an analytic study of inspirational speeches delivered by political leaders, business elites and cultural celebrities. Finally, It makes a detailed analysis and draws some conclusions on the realization of illocutionary force and the classification of illocutionary acts and their performing forms in inspirational speeches.The author presents a detailed analysis of the selected speeches from the perspective of illocutionary act and illocutionary force. On the one hand, the author illustrates the realization of illocutionary forces from the perspective of lexical devices, syntactical devices, phonetic devices and expression techniques. On the other hand, the author mainly discusses the classification of speech acts and their performing forms in the selected inspirational speeches, and then statistic analysis on the stylistic forms are made.This thesis not only verifies the feasibility of speech act theory in English inspirational speeches, but also replenishes its research range. The results are of great significance to pedagogical relations. By mastering methods of how to realize the illocutionary forces of a speech acts, teachers are able to give comprehensive and sophisticated guidance to students’ reading, speaking, writing etc. Furthermore, apart from English study, through the studying the speeches made by elites from all walks of life, students could be cultivated to further understand different cultures and social conventions during cross-culture communication. The results of the study provide feasible and practical implications for future research.