An Intertextual Analysis Of Selected Speeches Of Barack Obama

Intertextual relationships can serve indispensable functions in the production and interpretation of discourse. It refers to the construction of any text is regarded as a mosaic of citations; every text is absorbing and transforming from the other one.The thesis chooses this Selected Speeches of Barack Obama aiming to explore the intertextual phenomena which wildly exists in English political speeches and the universality and effects of the description in it. During this process, it reveals how the speaker applies intertextuality to indicate their political views successful in order to won people's support.Xin Bin distinguishes the intertextuality into two aspects: one is called specific intertextuality which refers to a text contains the text segment from specific source; the other one is generic intertextuality which is about the dynamism and mixture of genres and text types. Through the detailed analysis of Selected Speeches of Barack Obama, specific intertextuality, such as references, allusions and so on are shown. The thesis further discusses these methods reinforcing the persuasive and convincing of public political speaking. From the perspective of generic intertextuality, the mixture use of various types reflects the testimony or inclusive strategy.This thesis not only provides an intertextuality perspective in the analysis of the public discourse in appreciation and research, but also reveals the close relationship between language use and social process which depend on and interact with each other.