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1、1A General Stylistic Analysis of the Inaugural Address of Gorge Bush, the 41st President of the United States of America, on January 20, 1989-UNITY, DIVERSITY AND GENEROSITY Abstract: (omitted)Key words: (omitted)黄中军黄中军 I.IntroductionFrom the Stylistics point of view, the inaugural address of the pr
2、esident elect falls into the category of Public speech, which is more formal than everyday conversation, extemporaneous speech and advertisement but less formal than legal English and English for science and technology (EST). From the communication point of view it falls between spoken and written E
3、nglish. Therefore the inaugural address of the president has the characteristics of both spoken and written English. It uses a lot of big words and abstract nouns and is usually polite in tone, formal in style and complicated in sentence structure. In addition, the addresser often employs a wide var
4、iety of rhetorical devices so as to add a striking effect to it. II. Linguistic analysisA. Lexical style markers Like most inaugural addresses of the president elect, the address delivered by Mr. Gorge Bush also employs a lot of big words. For instance, among the 1378 words (in the selected parts) t
5、here are 256 words containing more than 6 letters, occupying 22 percent of the 2total. But in every day conversation, extemporaneous speech and advertisement the percentage is usually lower than 20 percent. Another characteristic is the employment of many abstract nouns, which can make the speech so
6、und more formal and profound, make the addresser sound more serious and erudite and make the audience have more confidence in the speaker. In the speech of Gorge Bush it is not hard to find so many such words. Here I just want to list some of them as an example: unity, diversity, generosity, express
7、ion, continuity, democracy, difference, continuance, freedom, action, prosperity, satisfaction, liberty, justice, engagement, peace, dissension, harmony, divisiveness, limitation, bipartisanship, opposition, attitude, intolerance, scourge, hopefulness. B. Syntactical style markers The inaugural addr
8、ess of the president elect usually uses a lot more compound or complex sentences than everyday conversation, extemporaneous speech and advertisement. This is also true of Mr. Bushs address, in which most of the sentences are relatively long and complicated for the purpose of leaving the audience an
9、immediate impression of formalness, seriousness and reliability. In the speech there are altogether 91 sentences, but 42 of them are compound or complex, taking up almost half of the total. In addition, most sentences in the speech contain more than 10 words and the longest sentence consists of 48 w
10、ords! ( the 2nd sentence in the 16th paragraph) But as we know, in everyday conversation most sentences contain no more than 10 words. As it is expected, the declarative sentence is the main type in the address but some other sentence types are also employed. For 3Example, Mr. Bush uses several impe
11、rative sentences in his speech such as, “ Let us negotiate soonand hard. But in the end, let us produce.” The use of imperative sentences here actually serves as a call to the audience and aims to arouse their enthusiasm. C. Grammatical style markers.As we know, the commonly used tense in the presid
12、ential inaugural address is the simple present, while the future tense, the present perfect tense and the simple past tense serve as the supplementary devices. This is because such addresses usually focus on the present and future time. Mr. Bushs address is no exception. Among the 91 sentences in th
13、e speech there are over 60 simple present, 9 present perfect and 6 future tense. As for the voices, there are only 7 sentences in the passive and all the others are in the active.D. Rhetorical devicesThe rhetorical device is a striking characteristic of public speech, which can add vividness and aes
14、thetic appreciation to it. Although there are a wide variety of rhetorical devices in English, the most important syntactical rhetorical device in public speech is perhaps parallelism, which can perfectly convey the strong feelings of the speaker, leave a deep impression to the audience, and make th
15、e language more rhythmic and vivid. In the speech of Mr. Bush, parallelism is used in many paragraphs.Example: parallelismGreat nations of the world are moving toward democracy-through the door to freedom. Men and women of the world move 4toward free markets-through the door to prosperity. The peopl
16、e of the world agitate for free expression and free thought-through the door to moral and intellectual satisfactions that only liberty allows. We know what works: Freedom works. We know whats right: Freedom is right. We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on earth: through free markets, We dont have to talk into the night about which form of government is better. We dont have to wrest justice from the kings-we only have to summon it from within
