奥巴马就职演说修辞分析详解奥巴马就职演说修辞分析详解.ppt

The Rhetoric of President Obama’s  Inauguration Speech Genre Analysis In this part, President Obama’s inaugural address will be analyzed in terms of genre. Furthermore, a text analysis and an analysis of how the text in the inaugural address is produced, distributed, and interpreted will be made to find out how the President encourages the American people. Defining Genre The definition of genre according to Swales, “is a recognizable communicative event characterized by a set of communicative purposes identified and mutually understood by the members of the professional or academic community in which it regularly occurs. Most often it is highly structured and conventionalized with constraints on allowable contributions in terms of their intent, positioning, form and functional value. These constraints, however, are often exploited by the expert members of the discourse community to achieve private intentions within the framework of socially recognized purposes.”[Bhatia, Vijay K.: Analyzing genre: Language use in professional settings (1998), p. 13] Theory of genre analysis To make an analysis of any genre, Bhatia suggests a list of steps that should be taken into consideration: placing the given text in a situational context. surveying existing literature. refining the situational/contextual analysis. selecting corpus. studying the institutional context. making a linguistic analysis.  Genre analysis of President Obama’s inaugural address The situation in the United States is quite special as the nation is in a crisis not seen since the Great Depression. The context of society has had an effect on the content of President Obama’s inaugural address; several times in his address, the President refers to the consequences of the crisis and encourages the people to move forward. Language and society have an influence on one another and therefore it is natural that the crisis is a major subject in the President’s address. Communicative purpo