对美国总统就职演讲辞的文体分析-外国语言学与应用语言学专业论文.docxVIP

ABSTRACT American Presidential Inaugural Address is an important variety of political public speech. Many researchers have already focused on the stylistic analysis of presidential inaugural addresses; they are mostly qualitative researches, aiming at the exploration of general synchronic stylistic features of APIAs. Meanwhile, there are some quantitative studies on APIAs, but they focus on a certain aspect of stylistic analysis or a president. And most of these researches refer to a few rhetorical devices only briefly. This research aims at general stylistic features of American presidential inaugural addresses and the linguistic changes of American presidential inaugural addresses from a diachronic perspective from these dimensions: lexical level, syntactical level, textual level and also discusses rhetorical devices used in presidential inaugural addresses. The 56 speeches are delivered by 44 American presidents from 1789 to 2008. By applying theories of modern stylistics and based on the approach proposed by Crystal and Davy, the paper chooses 10 samples according to time intervals of 24 years from all the speeches to analyze with detail from the dimensions of linguistic description, including lexical level, syntactic level, and textual level as well rhetorical devices and their rhetorical effectiveness, and to reveal the general tendency that is reflected in the addresses. The major findings of this study are as follows: At the lexical level, hard words are frequently used; those early addresses employed lots of hard words, and the mean of those Fog Indexes was very high; while the number of them is small in these later addresses; these are showing a declining tendency on the whole. As for nominalization, because of the occasion‘s formality, nominalization is often employed; the percentage of nominalization was high in those early addresses, while it gets decreased in these later addresses. So, presidents have been trying to make them more casual by employing