Stylistic Analysis of Obama’s Inaugural Speech
Stylistic Analysis of Obama’s Inaugural Speech
Abstract
Higher level English learners always pay attention to English public speech, especially those inaugural speeches. They take them as fine literary efforts and good analysis material. This paper tries to give an analysis of Obama’s inaugural speech from stylistic perspective, in order to help to better appreciate Obama’s presentation skills.
Keywords: stylistics, syntactic, lexics, rhetoric
Barack Hussein Obama was elected to be the forty-fourth president of America in November, 2008. His inaugural speech didn’t have very beautiful words, but it set up from people psychology and gave a general conclusion of present world. Therefore, his speech won many people’s support and trust with its strong infection and dramatically inspired American’s feelings and confidence. Here we try to give a stylistic analysis on Obama’s inaugural speech from lexical, syntactic and rhetoric levels, to reveals its style characteristics.
1. Lexical level
Word is the basic grammar unit. Different styles require using different words. Meanwhile the different stylistic colorings of the words also determine their different applicable scope. Here we would analyze Obama’s speech from two aspects in the lexical level.
A. Word structure According to M.A.K. Halliday’s concept of register, word structure is seriously affected by the mode of discourse, the tenor of discourse, the relationship between speaker and listeners, the field of discourse and what being said. The length of a word often has a close relationship with the formality of the text. In English, we often call those words containing six or above six letters, or three or above three syllables as BIG WORD. Generally an essay could show its formality by using a certain number of big words. In Obama’s inaugural speech, the whole text has 2395 words while the number of big words is 664, which make up 27.7% of the total. However, the proportion of big word in daily language is
Abstract
Higher level English learners always pay attention to English public speech, especially those inaugural speeches. They take them as fine literary efforts and good analysis material. This paper tries to give an analysis of Obama’s inaugural speech from stylistic perspective, in order to help to better appreciate Obama’s presentation skills.
Keywords: stylistics, syntactic, lexics, rhetoric
Barack Hussein Obama was elected to be the forty-fourth president of America in November, 2008. His inaugural speech didn’t have very beautiful words, but it set up from people psychology and gave a general conclusion of present world. Therefore, his speech won many people’s support and trust with its strong infection and dramatically inspired American’s feelings and confidence. Here we try to give a stylistic analysis on Obama’s inaugural speech from lexical, syntactic and rhetoric levels, to reveals its style characteristics.
1. Lexical level
Word is the basic grammar unit. Different styles require using different words. Meanwhile the different stylistic colorings of the words also determine their different applicable scope. Here we would analyze Obama’s speech from two aspects in the lexical level.
A. Word structure According to M.A.K. Halliday’s concept of register, word structure is seriously affected by the mode of discourse, the tenor of discourse, the relationship between speaker and listeners, the field of discourse and what being said. The length of a word often has a close relationship with the formality of the text. In English, we often call those words containing six or above six letters, or three or above three syllables as BIG WORD. Generally an essay could show its formality by using a certain number of big words. In Obama’s inaugural speech, the whole text has 2395 words while the number of big words is 664, which make up 27.7% of the total. However, the proportion of big word in daily language is
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