Analysis Of English Political Speeches From Feminist Stylistic Perspective

Nowadays,there are more and more females rising on the world political stage.With the development of the society,females' social status and professional roles as well as their psychological experiences have undergone a lot of changes.Moreover,media and information networks make female voices spread faster,and provide female voicing with a higher and greater platform.Therefore,in terms of construction of style and choice of discourse strategy,women may gradually break the dictatorship and repression of male hegemony in language use in a more active,more optimistic,more open,freer and stronger way.This thesis takes several of Hillary's representative political speeches as corpus,combines quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis,adopts the feminist stylistics as its theoretical framework,and discusses features of female style and the forms of gender discrimination and right awareness in the materials from different levels,following the steps of description,interpretation and evaluation.In the part of analysis of Hillary's speeches,this thesis reveals the unique characteristics of her speeches and her confident rebel against the male-dominated language conventions and sex stereotypes from a positive angle.Last but not least,starting from the tendency of diversification of text forms and the constant shifting of status and roles of the females as well as the increasing broadening of definition of feminist stylistics,this thesis points out the limitations and bottlenecks of the development of feminist stylistics,and makes corresponding proposals and puts forward implications for further research.To sum up,the major findings of this thesis are concluded as follows:First,based on the data,the general stylistic features of Hillary's speeches are as follows:At the phonological level,Hillary adopts numbers of contractions,which is helpful to shorten the distance between her and the audience;Hillary also adopts numbers of alliterations,which gives her speech a beauty of music and makes the speech more appealing and expressive.At the lexical level,the frequent employment of third-person pronouns helps better in shaping Hillary as objective;use of big words presents the formality of the speech and the serious attitude,making her more steady and earnest;use of abstract words helps better in shapingHillary as enthusiastic,making her easier to arouse the passion of the audience.At the syntactic level,use of long sentences enhances the degree of seriousness;besides the declarative sentences and the imperative sentences,Hillary uses many interrogative sentences,which helps better make the speech more vividly and lively;use of varieties of rhetorical devices makes her speeches more effective.Second,as one of the most outstanding female representatives,Hillary has shown her unique gender view,which finds best reflections in her speeches:At the lexical level,she employs a great many male expressions and commendatory terms when females are concerned.At the syntactic level,Hillary adopts lots of anti-gender-stereotype metaphors;compared with other processes of transitivity,Hillary adopts more material processes to reflect the initiative of females.At the textual level,Hillary adopts a positive and confident perspective to shape real and complete female images.Third,limitations of present studies of Feminist Stylistics:In the aspect of research scope and research content,most studies employ literary works as materials,focusing on sexual discriminative phenomena in the texts;in the aspect of research perspective,most studies presuppose females as victims of gender issues and take a negative perspective;in the aspect of research methods,qualitative approach is still predominant.Finally,implications and suggestions for further studies:In the aspect of research scope,texts of various genres should be taken into account;in the aspect of research content,fruits of different disciplines should be taken reasonable advantage of to carry out interdisciplinary studies;in the aspect of research perspective and research methods,qualitative approach should be combined with quantitative approach to improve the accuracy and objectivity of the analysis.