A Study On Obama’s State Of The Union Address From The Perspective Of Identification Theory

Kenneth Burke is the founder of new rhetoric. Although his New Rhetoric Theory is derived from the classic rhetoric, he redefines and enlarges the scope of rhetorical analysis. "Identification" is the core of his theories. In recent years, New Rhetoric Theory has drawn more and more attention and it has been applied to many researches. It provides a new rhetorical perspective for discourse analysis. However, few papers have analyzed Obama’s State of the Union Address based on New Rhetoric theory. This paper attempts to make a systematic analysis about 5 formal State of the Union Addresses delivered by president Obama from 2010 to 2014 by drawing on the core of Burke’s New Rhetoric Theory-"identification". It attempts to find out how Obama achieves identification with his audiences by using Identification Theory, so that his political proposals and opinions can be accepted.In terms of the methodology, this thesis adopts qualitative analysis. The paper first probes into the rhetorical situation of the five State of the Union Addresses. Then it studies the addresses from the aspects of rhetorical content and rhetorical form, in order to make clear how these rhetorical strategies help to maintain identification between the speaker and the listeners, thus achieving the goals of speaking. Besides, in order to show these strategies of identification directly, the frequency of these strategies has been counted in the paper.From the analysis, we can find that Obama is really an excellent speaker. His State of the Union Addresses display the strategies of identification very well. As for rhetorical content, he mainly utilizes three strategies:sympathy, antithesis and inaccuracy. As for rhetorical form, he mainly adopts conventional form, repetitive form, progressive form and figurative form. These strategies make his speeches more impressive and infectious. The reactions to his speeches are very good.This research contributes to understanding Kenneth Burke’s Identification Theory better. At the same time it makes a contribution to promoting the application of this theory. Through exploring State of the Union Addresses delivered by president Obama, this paper provides a novel perspective for political speech research. Meanwhile, it will enlighten English teaching and public speaking.