Abstract

As a new president’s inaugural speech, its purpose is to show its political stance, to inspire and win support of audiences. Presidential inaugural address has a sharp and obvious point, refined language and the power of persuasion, making people inspiring and encouraging. Rhetoric in the inaugural speech of the President of the United States plays an extremely important role, which is a key to influencing the success or failure of the inaugural address. In this paper, from the perspective of linguistics, rhetoric in English can be divided into three categories: lexical stylistic devices, syntactical stylistic devices and phonetic stylistic devices, including simile, metaphor, parallelism, antithesis, allusion, alliteration, and so on. Based on the analysis of Obama’s second inaugural address, this thesis has provided deep-seated penetration into inaugural address by dint of rhetoric devices. In addition, it has also reflected the rhetoric devices vividly and interestingly, and make readers have more deeply understanding of the presidential inauguration.

Key words: second inaugural address; rhetoric devices; metaphor

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction-1

2. Literature Review-1

2.1 Text Characteristic in English Speech-1

2.2 Rhetoric in English Political Speech-2

2.3 Previous Studies about Rhetoric-2

3. The Introduction of Rhetoric and Inaugural Address-3

3.1 The Introduction of Rhetoric -3

3.2 An Introduction of Inaugural Address-5

4. The Analysis of Rhetoric in Obama’s Second Inaugural Address-6

4.1 Lexical Stylistic Devices -7

4.2 Phonetic Stylistic Devices-9

4.3 Syntactical Stylistic Devices-10

5. Conclusion-12

Works Cited..13