A Study Of Language Iconicity In American Presidential Inaugural Address

American presidential inaugural address is a kind of special public speaking. It is asignificant moment for the newly elected president to inspire the public and illustrate hisviews about his future administration. And it is also a crucial moment to show the president’stalents and set up his own image. As a result, each presidential speech is polished anddecorated by a group of specialized writers so as to make it impress on the audience at themost. So it is of great value for linguisitic study. After reviewing all the previous studies ofinaugural address, we find most of them are from stylistic and generic perspectives and fewscholars ever studied this topic from a cognitive perspective. Therefore, this thesis tries toanalyse the addresses in view of iconicity which is an important theory in cognitive linguistics.Iconicity refers to natural connection between the linguistic signs and concept meaning whichhas become the heated topic in recent years. Iconicity was first proposed by semiotist C. S.Pierce, and then his opinion got recognition and support from other scholars, however, hisidea did not become popular because of the dominant position of Saussure. While in recentyears, iconicity theory draws more and more attention of scholars. In1965, Jakobsonchallenges language arbitrariness in his paper “Quest for the Essence of Language”. After that,Haiman and Givón become the representatives in this area. Due to their contributions to thisfield, more and more scholars pay attention to the truth that language reflects human cognitiveconstruction.This thesis takes iconicity as the fundamental theory,44pieces of inaugural addresses asthe subjects. And it realizes the combination of cognitive linguistic and political discourseanalysis. The aim is to find out how the words and sentences in the inaugural addressesrepresent language iconicity and how it helps the newly elected president gain the speecheffect. Theoretically, this thesis enriches the scope of iconicity field. At the same time, it alsoprovides English learners a new perspective to appreciate the inaugural addresses.The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter gives a general introduction tothe whole thesis, including background, significance and corpus of the study. The second chapter reviews relative researches on inaugural addresses at home and aboard. The thirdchapter gives a detailed explanatory description about the theory of iconicity. The fourthchapter analyses the American presidential inaugural addresses with the four principles oficonicity which are quantity iconicity, sequential iconicity, distance iconicity and markednessiconicity. The author takes the words and sentence structures in the inaugural address as thetarget of analysis, in order to find out the cognitive reasons of forming the special speech. Thefinal chapter is the conclusion part, including the answers to the research questions, thelimitations of the study and some suggestions for future research.