A Stylistic Analysis Of Visiting US Presidents' Speeches In Chinese Universities

The students today will be leaders of China tomorrow, as three Presidents who visited Chinese universities all made similar remarks in their speeches. Chinese audience needs to study them from a global perspective and obtain the true message from the Presidents. By systematically comparing and contrasting them, the thesis helps the reader go deeper in understanding the speeches. By applying theories of stylistic analysis and inter-cultural communication, this thesis deals with what makes the genre of public speeches and what makes the sub-genre of visiting US Presidents' speech in Chinese universities and what similarities and differences lie among them.This thesis studies the selected materials from three dimensions: linguistic description, schematic structure and text functioning, and inter-cultural context and communication, or namely, linguistic description, textual analysis, and contextual analysis. These selected speeches, although bearing their own characteristics, belong to the major genre of public speaking, which shows the features of the written mode with its highly logical organization of thoughts, closely-knit structure and formal language. They are different from daily conversation in that they concentrate on one topic with highly structured format and more formal language, and make a more effective way of delivery. They differ from the written mode in that the latter does not have to and cannot adapt to readers' immediate feedback or rely on skillful vocal delivery. The author makes it clear that language is a meaning potential and the use of language is to make choices from this potential. The choice is made according to the situation type in which language is used. The effectiveness of thespeeches is mostly decided by how the speakers understand the field of discourse, the tenor of discourse, and the mode of discourse. In short, they share many common grounds in terms of linguistic aspect and schematic structure, but due to the specific dissimilarities in time, in international backgrounds, and in personal styles, they still have their own features and they use different techniques to realize the similar strategies, which can be reflected by linguistic features and textual factors.