| American Presidential Inaugural Addresses are publicly delivered by the newly-elected presidents on Inauguration Day to the whole country and world. In the addresses, they lay out their administrative creeds and persuade the public to accept and support their ideas. As a unique and practical variety, the addresses are really significant. Studies on this kind of discourse can not only help readers further understand the meaning, but also better appreciate the essence of the English language. In addition, it facilitates the improvement of the speech lovers’skills in using public speaking language and promotes their abilities of English comprehension.This thesis applies cohesion theory to analyze American presidential inaugural addresses. The previous studies mostly choose one address to do research in detail, while in this thesis, three addresses which are most related to the present were chosen, namely, Bill Clinton’s, George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s inaugural address, to see if presidents prefer the same cohesive devices and which one is most frequently used. This study adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods. As a quantitative method, the main concern is about the high frequency of the cohesive devices. As a qualitative method, examples selected from the American presidential inaugural addresses present the presidents’language skills and their purpose behind the lines.The results of the studies are as follows:firstly, grammatical cohesive devices as substitution and ellipsis are seldom used. Secondly, reference is used very frequently. Thirdly, conjunctives are frequently used in addresses so as to make the text smooth. However, presidents more often use conjunctives in their simple forms because of considering the subjects of the audience, which are from different classes. At last, lexical cohesion also works in realizing cohesion, especially reiteration. Words sometimes seem to be more powerful in the realization of cohesion. |
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