A Pragmatic Analysis Of Illocutionary Forces In American Presidential Inaugural Addresses

The inaugural addresses of the American presidents have a great impact and significance in the history of the United States. Some of the presidential inaugural addresses (PIAS for short in this thesis) are regarded as classical representative masterpieces of American literature, and they also give the American people inspirations generation after generation. Therefore, the study of presidential inaugural addresses has drawn many researchers'attention.After a general and systematic review on the study of PIAS, it is found that the researches on PIAS are mainly carried out from the following perspectives: genre analysis perspective, stylistic perspective and political perspective. Few researchers carry out the study from the pragmatic perspective. The present research is a tentative study of the illocutionary forces of the rhetoric of PIAS and their pragmatic functions in the light of Austin and Searle's speech act theory.The new president, delivering an inaugural address, is to make the public know his political views, share his ideas and influence the public's attitudes. In the process of delivering the inaugural address, the president is at the same time declaring the new government policies and administrative principles. He has the objective to make the public accept and support him. His final purpose is to get the public persuaded. Therefore, the rhetoric of the American presidential inaugural address bears strong intention of persuasion. In order to realize the president's intention, various language devices which have strong illocutionary forces, are adopted in the presidential inaugural rhetoric.Within the framework of speech act theory in pragmatics, this thesis uses recent ten American PIAS that reveal the characteristics of the modern English public speaking as data to demonstrate how illocutionary forces are generally realized or strengthened in this typical kind of political speech. Through a systematic analysis of the data from three perspectives: lexical expressions, syntactic devices and figures of speech, it is concluded that the realization of the presidents'intentions or the illocutionary forces in the PIAS are realized or strengthened mainly through pronoun "we", modal auxiliary and commissive verbs, archaism and the word"God", address forms such as"my fellow citizens", etc., imperatives, parallelism, repetition, metaphor and personification in the ten addresses. Besides, this thesis also analyzes the pragmatic functions of various illocutionary forces.Theoretically speaking, this study is an extended application of the speech act theory. Practically speaking, it not only helps people understand the nature of the rhetoric of American PIAS, but also provides researchers insightful implications for the further study of PIAS. What's more, this study will help public speakers achieve an effective persuasion by adopting various speech acts with strong illocutionary forces.