An Analysis Of Themes And Thematic Progression Patterns In Michelle Obama’s Speeches On Campus

Michelle Obama, the first lady of America, boasting of the charism of speech delivery, is an excellent public speaker. Her speeches are infectious and inspiring, and have drawn more and more attention nowadays. In order to explore the structure design of her campus speeches, the thesis tries to analyze Michelle Obama’s18campus speeches based on the theory of theme, thematic progression pattern and hyper-theme.The thesis attempts to discover:(1) The similarity within Michelle Obama’s speeches on the aspect of thematic structure.(2) The contribution of thematic progression patterns in Michelle Obama’s speeches to achieve her goals in the process of speech delivering.(3) The function of hyper-theme in the process of information flow and the information distribution rule in Michelle Obama’s campus speeches.Both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted to make the research objective and convincing. In the research process, the frequency of simple theme, multiple theme, clausal theme and various thematic progression patterns is analyzed respectively. Moreover, the pronouns taken as topical theme in simple theme and multiple theme are also calculated to find out the interpersonal relationship between Michelle Obama and the audience.Through quantitative methods and quantitative methods, the research findings can be shortened as follows. As for the aspect of theme, the quantity of simple themes outweighs the other two-multiple themes and clausal themes. The number of pronouns takes an overwhelming advantage over other elements as topical themes in the speeches, and the application of the first person pronouns and the second person pronouns is much higher than that of the third person pronouns. And unmarked themes are much preferred by Michelle. On the aspect of thematic progression patterns, Michelle Obama is in favor of the parallel pattern and the combined pattern.In the analysis of hyper-theme, topic sentences and hyper-themes are not the same one most of the time, for hyper-themes do not give the audience more kernel information. And under more circumstances, it paves the way for the understanding of topic sentences.The findings prove that the analysis of Michelle’s campus speeches based on the combination of thematic structures and hyper-themes is applicable.