Stylistic Features of Political Speech 以2008年奥巴马就职演说为例

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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.