A Study On The Illocutionary Forces In American Presidential Inaugural Addresses From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

The inaugural address of the American president,a special style in American literature,is endowed with characteristics of both ideological expression and language expression.The study on presidential addresses has already drawn many scholars' attention from different fields.By studying the literature home and abroad,it is not difficult to find that the previous perspectives such as rhetorical perspective,stylistic perspective,critical discourse analysis as well as systemic functional analysis are the main research directions.Few researchers carry out the study from the view of speech act theory.Therefore,it has a certain theoretical and practical significance to conduct the study on illocutionary forces in the light of Austin and Searle's speech act theory.In order to reveal the features of the modern political speech,time factor should be taken into account in the process of research.Therefore,the thesis adopts the recent ten American presidential inaugural addresses as data to illustrate how illocutionary forces are realized.In this thesis,qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted to explore the illocutionary forces in American presidential inaugural addresses.By analyzing these selected speeches,it is found that the lexical device can serve as an effective way to realize the illocutionary forces.They are pronoun “we”,modal auxiliary verbs,archaism words in the Bible and the special noun “God”.Meanwhile,other language devices such as special sentence types and phonological patterns,which can facilitate the new presidents to realize their illocutionary forces,are also analyzed in this thesis.In addition,this thesis also expounds the principle pragmatic functions of various illocutionary forces.Theoretically,the thesis not only validates the feasibility of the speech act theory in the special variety of political speech,but also extends the application scope of the theory.Practically,on the one hand,the research results can help the people to better capture the essence of American presidential inaugural addresses,on the other hand,the process of the thesis can also enlighten the people on how to effect a successful communication by employing various speech acts which bear strong illocutionary forces.