| American president’s inaugural address has become an essential part in political public speaking. It is informative and concrete since the presidents’ attitude on some specific events will be revealed and the new government policy as well as some other political and livelihood-related information will be made open. This research on the U.S. presidents’ first inaugural addresses intends to explore, in terms of average sentence length, sentence type and sentence complexity, and figure out how they have changed with time, the general and personal syntactic features of the U.S. presidents’ first inaugural addresses.Thirty-nine speeches are found in the history of American presidents’ first inauguration(from 1789 to 2009) and all these 39 speeches have been chosen as the corpus for this research. The software of Excel has been used to collect and process statics and the software of SPSS has been used to conduct variance analysis to ensure the validity and reliability of the results of data analysis.The major findings of this research are as follows:The average total word amount of all the 39 inaugural addresses is 2674.1. The longest speech amounts 8444 by Harrison and the briefest speech falls to 985 by Roosevelt. The speeches in about every 50 years have not changed a lot and a clear trend which reflects the diachronic change of speech length can barely be found.Inaugural addresses given by different American presidents vary in length irregularly and the total word amount in speeches mostly depends on presidents’ predilection and personal style.The average sentence length of all the U.S. presidents’ first inaugural addresses is 27.88 words for each sentence and in general, the sentences become shorter in length. In addition, the use of short sentences(less than 10 words) in speeches witnessed an upward trend and by contrast, the use of long sentences(no less than 40)in speeches showed a significant downward trend in general.In terms of American presidents’ choice of sentence pattern, the situation is quite similar, i.e., declarative sentences are most frequently used. Besides, the average percentage of complex sentence employed in the American presidents’ inaugural addresses is 53.6% which indicates that compared with other language forms,inaugural addresses have the features of formal written language and meanwhile keep part of the characteristics of spoken language. Furthermore, the use of simple sentence witnessed an upward trend in general and the use of complex sentence showed a downward trend on the whole.When it comes to the use of various kinds of clause in speeches, the total clause amount of all the thirty-nine presidential inaugural addresses is 2727 and the average clause amount is 70. The use of attributive clause ranks first and it is followed by adverbial clause, objective clause, subjective clause, appositive clause and predicative clauses respectively. From a diachronic perspective, the average number of clause types in each complex sentence was on decline. To be more specific, adverbial clause of condition, time and cause are the top three most commonly-used adverbial clauses in American presidents’ inaugural addresses.In general, William Harrison’s speech can be the one most hard to understand on syntactical level and Carter’s speech can be the one people have least problems for understanding. From a diachronic perspective, the speeches delivered at the early stage of American presidents’ inaugural address history share the characteristics of not very long in length but long in average sentence length, frequent use of complex sentences and not a lot use of various clauses; the speeches delivered in mid-term have the features of long in length but not very long in average sentence length, less use of complex sentence and more clauses included compared with those in early time;the speeches delivered in the last few decades have the characteristics of shorter in length and average sentence length, inclination of using simple sentence and clause amount on average level. |
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