A Comparative Study Of Cohesion Patterns In Barack Obama’s And Gorge W·Bush’s Weekly Addresses

The Weekly Address of the President of the United States (also known as theWeekly Radio Address or Your Weekly Address) is the weekly discussion of currentevents in the United States by the President. It is different from usual oral chatting orwritten documents. This genre has its distinctive language features. PresidentsObama’s and Bush’s addresses are prepared in form of written language before beingdelivered verbally. They have received extensive attention because they exhibitcharacteristics of formal written language and spoken language. Many analyses havebeen done from rhetoric, pragmatics and systemic functional grammar perspectives.In terms of lexical cohesion, some researchers investigated conjunctions in Obama’sweekly addresses.Lexical cohesion has aroused many linguists’ attention both at home and abroadsince it was firstly proposed. Halliday&Hassan (1976), Hoey (1991), LiaoQiuzhong(1992), Hu Zhuanglin (1994), Zhu Yongsheng (2001) and many otherscholars have conducted studies on this topic, In which Hoey’s lexical cohesiontheory is considered as an objective one and has advantage in feasibility as well asexplanatory power. He is regarded as the first person to make an explicit and clearexplanation of the importance of lexical patterns in organizing text. So far, Hoey’stheory has been applied to analyze many texts but American Presidents’ weeklyaddresses have not been studied.Based on Hoey’s framework, this study tries to conduct a contrastive study onlexical cohesion patterns in American Presidents Barack Obama’s and Gorge W.Bush’s weekly addresses. Three research questions will be answered.1. Are there anydifferences of lexical repetition patterns between Obama’s and Bush’s weeklyaddresses?2. Are there any differences of bonds between Obama’s and Bush’s weeklyaddresses?3. Are there any differences of central and marginal sentences betweenObama’s and Bush’s weekly addresses? Totally104weekly addresses were collectedto form two corpora. Transcripts of President Obama’s52weekly addresses (31268words) consist of Corpus1and transcripts of President Bush’s52weekly addresses (31131words) form Corpus2. Then a contrastive study on lexical cohesion betweenthe two corpora is conducted to investigate the similarities and differences with thehelp of software Antconc (version3.2.0.) and software SPSS (version19.0).It was found that (1) the preferred lexical repetition patterns in Obama’s weeklyaddresses are simple lexical repetition, complex lexical repetition, co-reference,simple partial paraphrase, substitution, simple mutual paraphrase and complexparaphrase. The preferred lexical repetition patterns in Bush’s weekly addresses aresimple lexical repetition, simple mutual paraphrase, complex lexical repetition,co-reference, simple partial paraphrase, substitution and complex paraphrase; there isno significant difference in terms of simple lexical repetition, complex lexicalrepetition, substitution, simple partial paraphrase, significant difference is displayed interms of simple mutual paraphrase, co-reference and complex paraphrase.(2)significant difference exists between corpus1and corpus2in terms of bonds;(3) nosignificant difference is found in terms of marginal sentences; though a statisticallysignificant difference is observed in terms of central sentences.In a nutshell, this thesis can shed some light on deep comprehension of weeklyaddresses and provides some implications for the listening of weekly addresses.