An Analysis Of Illocutionary Forces In English Political Speeches

The language of political speech usually has the purpose of arousing people's interest,persuading them to accept the speaker's political policy and then inspiring them to take actions to support the speaker.Since the political discourse is endowed with characteristics of both spoken language and written language,such kind of speeches have drawn the attention of many scholars,especially the linguists.The former president of the United States Barack Obama is recognized as an outstanding political speaker.His speech is full of rhythm and has an appropriate tone,and thus is infectious.It is his outstanding presentation skill that helps him win the re-election of the 45th president of the United States.Therefore,Obama's speech is regarded as a model of the political speech.Within the framework of Austin and Searle's speech act theory,this thesis aims to analyze and demonstrate how illocutionary forces are realized or strengthened through various language devices such as lexical devices,syntactic devices and phonetic devices and their pragmatic functions in English political speeches by taking thirty speeches randomly chosen from Obama's radio addresses in his second presidential term as the research samples.Through the analysis of Obama's radio addresses,it is found that the illocutionary forces of the political speeches could be realized through pronoun "we",modal auxiliary verbs,commissive verbs,directive verbs,the use of "God",imperative sentences,parallelism,repetition,antithesis,"I know/believe" sentences,the adverbial clauses of condition,alliteration and consonance.In addition,the pragmatic functions of expressing a sense of intimacy,gratitude and compliment,winning people's trust,asking for God's blessing,making promises,imposing obligations,uniting people together,stating,highlighting,warning,appealing,motivating and persuading are all concluded.This thesis reveals the relationship between the language devices used to realize the illocutionary forces and the purposes of those illocutionary forces.Theoretically speaking,the present study validates the feasibility of the speech act theory in the analysis of English political speech and expands the application scope of the speech act theory.Practically speaking,the research results can not only help people to understand the nature of the political speech,but also enlighten the speakers on how to deliver a successful speech by using various speech acts with strong illocutionary forces.