就职演说的文体分析

就职演说的文体分析

第一篇：就职演说的文体分析

A General Stylistic Analysis of the Inaugural Address of Gorge

Bush, the 41st President of the United States of America, on

January 20, 1989

------UNITY, DIVERSITY AND GENEROSITY

Abstract:(omitted)

Key words:(omitted)

黄中军

I.Introduction

From the Stylistics point of view, the inaugural address of the

president elect falls into the category of Public speech, which is

more formal than everyday conversation, extemporaneous

speech and advertisement but less formal than legal English and

English for science and technology(EST).From the

communication point of view it falls between spoken and written

English.Therefore the inaugural address of the president has the

characteristics of both spoken and written English.It uses a lot of

big words and abstract nouns and is usually polite in tone, formal

in style and complicated in sentence structure.In addition, the

addresser often employs a wide variety of rhetorical devices so

as to add a striking effect to it.II.Linguistic analysis

A.Lexical style markers

Like most inaugural addresses of the president elect, the

address delivered by Mr.Gorge Bush also employs a lot of big

words.For instance, among the 1378 words(in the selected

parts)there are 256 words containing more than 6 letters,

occupying 22 percent of the1

total.But in every day conversation, extemporaneous speech and

advertisement the percentage is usually lower than 20

percent.Another characteristic is the employment of many

abstract nouns,which can make the speech sound more formal

and profound, make

the addresser sound more serious and erudite and make the

audience

have more confidence in the speaker.In the speech of Gorge

Bush it

is not hard to find so many such words.Here I just want to list

some

of them as an example: unity, diversity, generosity,

expression,continuity, democracy, difference, continuance,

freedom, action,prosperity, satisfaction, liberty, justice,

engagement, peace, dissension, harmony, divisiveness, limitation,

bipartisanship, opposition, attitude,intolerance, scourge,

hopefulness.B.Syntactical style markers

The inaugural address of the president elect usually uses a

lot more compound or complex sentences than everyday

conversation, extemporaneous speech and advertisement.This is

also true of Mr.Bush’s address, in which most of the sentences

are relatively long and complicated for the purpose of leaving the

audience an immediate impression of formalness, seriousness

and reliability.In the speech there are altogether 91 sentences,

but 42 of them are compound or complex, taking up almost half

of the total.In addition, most sentences in the speech contain

more than 10 words and the longest sentence consists of 48

words!(the 2nd sentence in the 16th paragraph)But as we know,

in everyday conversation most sentences contain no more than

10 words.As it is expected, the declarative sentence is the main type in the address but some other sentence types are also

employed.For

Example, Mr.Bush uses several imperative sentences in his

speech such as, “ Let us negotiate soon—and hard.But in the

end, let us produce.” The use of imperative sentences here

actually serves as a call to the audience and aims to arouse their

enthusiasm.C.Grammatical style markers.As we know, the

commonly used tense in the presidential inaugural address is the

simple present, while the future tense, the present perfect tense

and the simple past tense serve as the supplementary

devices.This is because such addresses usually focus on the

present and future time.Mr.Bush’s address is no

exception.Among the 91 sentences in the speech there are over

60 simple present, 9 present perfect and 6 future tense.As for the

voices, there are only 7 sentences in the passive and all the others

are in the active.D.Rhetorical devices

The rhetorical device is a striking characteristic of public

speech, which can add vividness and aesthetic appreciation to

it.Although there are a wide variety of rhetorical devices in

English, the most important syntactical rhetorical device in public

speech is perhaps parallelism, which can perfectly convey the

strong feelings of the speaker, leave a deep impression to the

audience, and make the language more rhythmic and vivid.In the

speech of Mr.Bush, parallelism is used in many

paragraphs.Example: parallelism

Great nations of the world are moving toward democracy---through the door to freedom.Men and women of the

world move toward free markets---through the door to

prosperity.The people of the world agitate for free expression and

free thought---through the door to moral and intellectual