A Study Of The Theme And Thematic Progression Patterns Of American President Inaugural Addresses

When the new governm ent is established, newly elected president is supposed to have an inaugural address. And this addr ess is of great importance to the president himself, the new government as well as the citizens. At present, most scholars’ studies on American inaugural addresses concen trate on pragm atics, modality system, appraisal resources, key words and other aspects. This thesis then carries out the study on American inaugural addresses from the theme structure and them atic progression patterns proposed by H alliday and other linguists. Theme structure and them atic progression belongs to the textual function of language which is one of the three metafunctions of language. And they are one of the i mportant ways of achieving cohesion and coherence of a te xt. The selection of the theme reflects the au thor or speaker’s communicative intention. And th ematic progression shows the flow of information in the text. This thesis carri es out the study on the them e structure and thematic progression of Am erican presidential inaugural address, aim ing to find out how the themes and thematic progressions are distributed and analyze the role they play in the addresses.This thesis conducts both quantitative and qualitative analysis on the them e structure and thematic progression pattern of American presidential inaugural address. This study firstly constructs a corpus of Am erican presidential inaugural address. The corpus constructed contains 21 Am erican presidential inaugural addresses. The selection of the addresses is based on a book nam ed The Most Passionate President Inaugural Addresses, because the addresses in this book basically reflect the features of American president inaugural addresses, and Oba ma’s first inaugural address is added. Then com es the manual annotation to dif ferent themes and them atic progression patterns. After that, with the help of the retrieval software Antconc, hits of different themes and them atic progression p atterns are g ot. Then th eir ratios are calculated. After this, in accordan ce with the difference of dif ferent themes and thematic progression patterns’ distribution, the selected language material is analyzed.Through the research of the selected language materials, this thesis gets the following results:(1) among all the types of them es studied in this thesis, sim ple theme occupies the highest ratio, that is, it is the most widely distributed; multiple theme ranks second; predicated theme is the least used one. And it has been found that the distribution of different themes has a close relationship with the features of themes themselves and the addresses;(2) th e distribution of thematic progression patterns is as follows. The one that occup ies the highest ratio is parallel thematic progression; then it is the sim ple linear them atic progression that com es the second; as for concentrated thematic progression and cro ssing thematic progression, their ratios are very close. But alternating thematic progression and derived thematic progression are rarely used in the selected language materials;(3) in addition, this study also finds out that the app lication of them e structure and thematic progression patterns plays an important role in the cohesion and coherenc e of addresses and they also have their interpersonal function to play, such as persuading and transmitting meaning.