| The US presidents' inaugural address could be regarded as the highly concentration of the American culture.America has the strongest power around the world,and American president is the symbol of the nation's power.Thus,presidential inaugural addresses could be typical materials for analyzing the identity of an American president.Many researches done by different scholars have performed studies from different linguistic perspectives of the Americna presidential inaugural addresses.But in those researches,no one did from a sociolinguistic perspective and little in identity construction.Therefore,this paper sets out to answer the following three questions: First,by what means identity construction in the Obama's inaugural addresses has realized? Second,what kind of identity in Obama's inaugural addresses has constructed? Third,whether the identity of Obama in his inaugural addresses is single one or not?The author did a literature review on previous studies of presidential inaugural address and presidential identity in domestic and overseas.Accordingly,this paper has chosen the 2009 and 2013 Obama's inaugural address for the study.And further analysis was based on the theory of Labovian model of narrative analysis and the theory of identity construction.By analyzing the narrative structure and some words' function,it could be recognized that Obama was more inclined to establish his positive identity in the social group,and the identity of Obama was not a single one in the inaugural addresses.Obama had constructed the identities of the US president,the American people and the African American.By means of the Labovian model of narrative analysis,this paper could provide a new perspective for the study of the inaugural address.Meanwhile,the combination of the Labovian model of narrative analysis and the theory of identity in sociology is effective in the study of identity construction. |
PDF Full Text Request