Genre Analysis On English Prepared Public Speeches

V. K. Bhatia's cognitive structuring model integrates sociology, psychology and linguistics with genre study; and thus possesses a strong explanatory power over discourses. The cognitive structuring is composed of moves, which are in turn realized through strategies. Discourse patterns, according to Bhatia, are cognitive in nature in the sense that they reflect, to some extent, accumulated and conventionalized knowledge available to members of a particular discourse community. The cognitive nature of genres is also displayed through strategies that genre-users select to accomplish their private intentions. The contribution Bhatia has done to genre analysis is that he not only stresses the communicative purpose shared by a collection of communicative events, but also emphasizes individual intent. The cognitive nature of genre-texts is after all realized through linguistic expressions. Correspondingly, another emphasis of Bhatia's model falls on the study of lexico-grammatical manifestations of moves and strategies.Based on Bhatia's framework, the paper analyzes 28 English prepared public speeches which are collected from an Anthology of Public Speeches and the Internet. This thesis aims to summarize the cognitive structuring of English prepared public speeches, to investigate the strategies which speakers choose to convey their communicative purpose, and to uncover linguistic realizations of moves and strategies. Our study reveals that the cognitive structuring of PPS is composed of five moves, each of which is realized through the strategies. But a strategy does not solely belong to a definite move; it may appear in other moves, in this case, its function would change. The choices of strategies are principally determined by speakers' communicative purpose and influenced by thesubject of the speech, the listeners, the place, and the occasion. The study also demonstrates that the sequencing of the moves enjoys a great flexibility, which to some degree reflects the dynamic nature of genre.It is assumed that the research findings can promote the understanding of how writers/speakers select strategies to achieve their communicative purpose within the constraints imposed by the genre to which that discourse belongs.