A Study Of Emotion Expression And Accent Performance In Inspirational Speeches On Campus In USA

Inspirational speech on campus, as a type of public speech, plays a vital role in inspiring college students in USA. Emotion expression is an indispensable part in the speech, among which intonation is one of the most direct and important way to express the speaker's emotion. This paper tries to analyze the emotion expression in inspirational speech from the pragmatic perspective, with the help of auditory recognition method and Praat software.The perception experiment verifies that there actually exist six basic kinds of emotion types in inspirational speech; they are appeal, sadness, anger, happiness,surprise and neutrality emotion. Emotion expression depends on the speaker's prosodic variation primarily, and the accent is an important prosodic factor to express the speaker's emotion. Zhang Lixia(2014) finds that accent serves for highlighting intention in Chinese discourse. This thesis extends the study to the emotional speeches in inspirational speech and then proves the rule that accent serves for the speaker's intention in discourse based on systematic analysis.The result shows: The accented words in appeal emotion are used to encourage the audiences to struggle for success with strong perseverance, and the accented words are mainly verbs with positive and neutral meanings. The words in sadness emotion are accented to make sad atmosphere to evoke audiences' emotional resonance, and the verbs with negative meaning are accented frequently. The accented words in anger and happiness emotion are used to depict the specific events that cause the corresponding emotional states and strengthen the emotion intention. The words in surprise emotion are accented to make surprising atmosphere to enhance the expression effects. Besides, the distribution of accented words in anger, happiness and surprise emotion is relatively dispersed. The accented words in neutrality emotion are used to deliver objective information, and they are mostly nouns and verbs. To sum up,the accented words are used to highlight the speaker's expression intention in inspirational speech, in order to achieve the speaker's inspiring purpose.