| The US Presidents5 weekly addresses are the weekly English speeches delivered by the presidents of the United States about the current affairs of the country in person.They are characterized by both formal written and spoken language.Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump are the presidents in the United States.Their speeches on various occasions have aroused wide attention from scholars at home and abroad.And the styles of the two presidents are very different.At present,many scholars have conducted studies on the speeches of the two presidents mainly from the perspectives of pragmatic presupposition,critical discourse analysis,and systemic functional grammar,etc.Many linguists have paid attention to metadiscourse since it was put forward,but there were relatively limited studies on the speeches of Obama and Trump from the perspective of metadiscourse,and no scholar has ever compared the speeches of these two presidents from the perspective of metadiscourse.This study uses Hyland's theoretical framework and classification model of metadiscourse to compare the uses of metadiscourse in the weekly addresses of Obama and Trump.The purpose is to answer two main questions:First,what's the frequency use of metadiscourse in the weekly addresses of Obama and Trump respectively?Second,what are the similarities and differences between the frequency use of metadiscourse in the weekly addresses of Obama and Trump?In order to reach this research goal,this study has selected 60 weekly addresses of Obama and Trump to establish two corpora.Corpus 1 includes 30 weekly addresses of Obama(16,788 words in total)during 2016-2017,and corpus 2 consists of 30 weekly addresses of Trump(16316 words in total)in 2017.Then,after manual identification,Excel was used for statistics.Finally,SPSS(Version 19.0)was adopted to test the similarities and differences between the two corpora.The results show that there are a large number of metadiscourse markers in both presidential weekly addresses.Although there is no significant difference in the total number of metadiscourse markers,the use of interactional metadiscourse is far more than the use of interactive metadiscourse in these two corpora.In terms of interactional metadiscourse,the first three markers with the highest frequency in Obama s weekly addresses are engagement markers,hedges and attitude markers,while in Trump s weekly addresses,they are self mention,attitude markers and engagement markers.And there are significant differences in the use of all five sub-categories of interactional metadiscourse,including hedges,boosters,attitude markers,self mention and engagement markers.With regard to interactive metadiscourse,the first three markers with the highest frequency in Obama's weekly addresses are transition markers,code glosses and endophoric markers,while in Trump s weekly addresses,they are transition markers,code glosses and frame markers.Among the five sub-categories of interactive metadiscourse,there are significant differences in the use of transition markers,frame markers and endophoric markers,but there are no significant differences in the use of code glosses and evidentials.Through this research,we can not only understand the different speech styles of the two presidents,but also discover the characteristics,the ways of expressions and similarities and differences in the two presidential speeches.This study also provides a reference for revealing the similarities and differences in thinking patterns,political intentions and political tendencies of the two presidents.Meanwhile,I believe that English learners can understand the importance of use of metadiscourse in political speeches,and learn how to use them in their related speeches.Certainly,this study can also provide help for English learners' improvement of listening to and reading weekly addresses by the presidents of the United States. |
PDF Full Text Request