Accent And Intention-The Phonetic Analysis Of Obama’s Speeches

Barack Obama was reelected as the President of United States in2012. Althougha number of factors led to his final success, his spoken eloquence, to some extent,contributed to his achievement of being the American president twice. The researcheson his speeches mainly focus on the levels of critical discourse analysis,systemic-functional grammar, the appraisal theory, stylistics, cognition and so on.Since Obama’s speeches are verbal, phonetic elements occupy a great position in hisspeeches. However, the phonetic studies of his speeches are few. So this thesis adoptsthe phonetic perspective to analyze Obama’s speeches.Prosodic features can deliver certain information and convey emotional priorities.Accents have three acoustic features---pitch, duration and intensity. Among all, pitchis the most significant feature. The basic function of accent is to highlight thediscourse intention and emotion by means of different degrees of amplification ofphonology. Obama’s speeches are delivered for some particular purposes or intentions.Therefore, based on the paper of Zhang (2013), under the theoretical framework ofaccents, intention and the Appraisal theory (systematic-functional grammar), thethesis expands the study to Obama’s speeches to verify the relationship betweenaccents and intention in his speeches. This thesis collects three types of Obama’sspeeches, namely the presidential televised debates in2012, the victory speech in2012and the five weekly addresses from2011to2013. The total duration of those ismore than1200seconds. The phonetic process software Praat has been utilized toannotate the collected data. Based on the annotation, the accented words in speechesare gained.The analysis is made from two dimensions. From the horizonal dimension, thethesis probes into the relationship between the used accents and specific intentions ineach type of Obama’s speeches. From the vertical dimension, the thesis analyzes therelationship between the used accents and specific intentions as to the same topic.After the delicate analysis, the study proves that in Obama’s political speeches, accentis the way to make his intention prominent. The accented ratio of the three types ofpolitical speeches has no obvious variance. The results show that accented words tendto be the core words, then “quantity” words. The core words including nouns, verbsand pronouns which possess the major content and concepts are used to highlight thespeaker’s intention in political discourse. And the “quantity” words such as auxiliaryverbs, adjectives, adverbs, numerals and prepositions are given to emphasize the subjective degree of the speaker. In summary, in Obama political speeches, accentsserves for highlighting the speaker’s intention, the speaker’s subjectivity, furtherconveying the information and influence the audience’s mind.