BW1103 牛西月 111006050334
Stylistic Features of Political Speech
—taking the case of “Change Has Come to America”
English political speech refers to the speech that calls for people what to do and what not to do. Its principal contents concern the methods or means by which something should be done about war and peace, national defense, import and export, legislation, and so on.
An English political speech is one that the speaker, usually on behalf of a certain class, society, or party, makes in English to the audience on some important matters and relationships home and abroad. Sometimes the individual also makes such a speech for the purpose of declaring his political propositions or ideas, nowadays this type of public speaking has a wild range of application such as stumping speeches is of strong political tendency with rigid logic and arousing force. The aim of speakers is to influence audience.
There are many varieties of it such as inaugural address, speech in the war and speech in the college abroad. Owing to the relationship between politics and presidents’ speech and the culture background it is in, the political speech has formed its own stylistic features. Then I’ll try to analyze the stylistic features of political speech throughout Obama’s inaugural address in 2008: Change Has Come to America.
1. Lexical feature
Stylists usually have a criterion to analyze words’ length. That is, more than 6 letters or 3 syllables. If a word contains more than 6 letters or 3 syllables, it is a long word, which origin from some formal words in Latin, French and Greek.
The proportion of long words is not more than 20%. Then we can observe that words that president use in his inaugural address is very formal and word structure is very complicated. The total words are 2396, in which long words account for 27%, such as generation, depression and opportunity. In addition, many words is derivatives and compound words, such as productive, inventive, sweatshops, risk-taker, faint-hearted, short-cut. Word is the basic grammatical unite which is smaller than sentence and it is also the basic cell to form a lecture. When Obama referred to 106-year-old woman，Ann Nixon Cooper，he just said she cannot cast a vote because of her complexion. He avoided using the word “black” to be involved in racial discrimination.
2. Syntactical feature
In informal speeches, orators usually use short sentences to support their views. However, as for Obama’s formal inaugural address, Obama is inclined to use the long sentences because the length of the sentence is influences by the mode of the discourse and also related to the textual function and interpersonal function of a language. The longest sentence contains 49 words. The sentence structure of political speech is more complicated than that of daily conversation because the common use of long sentences. American presidents give their speech to the people and expect to make their government policies known to the public to persuade them to accept and support their policies. This personal relationship determines that all the presidents’ speech should not be as casual as daily conversation. Meantime, he also uses some short sentences that alternate long sentences. The short sentence is “yes we can!” which received the warmest react.
Obama also chose different kinds of sentences, such as declarative sentence, imperative sentence and rhetorical question. This sentence “This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time.” use the strong declarative mood. In addition, he always used “let us” to compose imperative sentence. Imperative sentence can arouse audience’s mood to support lecturers. Compared to imperative sentence, rhetorical question is seldom used. But it can receive better results if used properly.
3. Rhetorical features
Presidents’ speech is a kind of speech happening in a particular situation which is an important activity of human’s public activity. The rhetoric is one of the main content of speech and rhetorical devices are closely related to the skill of public speaking. The object of a political speech is to explain, convince and persuade the audience that what the speaker is saying and representing so that they should support them. In some sense, using proper rhetorical devices like alliteration, metaphor, etc. may have some stylistic effects.
In order to reinforce expressive force and infection force, Obama used many rhetorical features. He chose parallelism, antithesis and repetition and alliteration.
Parallelism is one of the most frequently used rhetoric figures. It refers to a structural arrangement of words, clause, sentence, paragraphs and even parts of the text. In another words: “similarity of structure in a pair or series of related words, phrases or clauses” For example, he use a parallel sentence to start his speech, “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”, which attract audiences’ attentions at the beginning of the speech.
Antithesis is used when two opposites are introduced in the same sentence, for contrasting effect, which is either coordinate in meaning or symmetrical in structure. Then Obama used this rhetoric to reinforce his express. “To those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those -- to those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you.” Antithesis makes comparison more distinct, and makes thesis more highlighted.
Alliteration is the repetition of the same sounds or of the same kinds of sounds at the beginning of words or in stressed syllables of an English language phrase. In Obama’s inaugural address, the alliteration is “block by block, brick by brick…” it makes speech rhythmical in language, poetic in article and vivid in words.
As has been mentioned above, this paper analyzes the stylistic feature of Obama’s inaugural address through three different levels. The stylistic analysis of a political speech can make readers comprehend it better. Meantime, readers obtain speaking skills and learners develop their language skills.
Stylistic Features of Political Speech 以2008年奥巴马就职演说为例
