| As the representative analytical text,the presidential Inaugural Addresses are the focus of Critical Discourse Analysis.The Inaugural Addresses of presidents of the United States is a political speech delivered to the domestic and abroad by the newly elected president on the Inauguration Day of the President.Through this speech,the president announced his policy agenda and persuaded the public to accept and support his views.By directly communicating with the people,the distance between each other has a great impact on the politics and society of the United States.From the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis,this paper takes the three-dimensional framework model of Fairclough,measurement stylistics and interpersonal function theory as the theoretical basis,and the NLTK repository in python as the research tool to conduct a diachronic analysis of the Inaugural Addresses of the presidents of the United States.According to Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework model,this paper will be divided into three parts: description;interpretation and explanation,aimed at solving the following three aspects:1.What are the stylistic features of the presidential Inaugural Addresses?2.How to use interpersonal functions in the presidential Inaugural Addresses to achieve interactive effects?3.What is the difference in the subject of the article in the presidential Inaugural Addresses? What kind of ideology and power relationship does the presidential Inaugural Addresses reflect?In addition,this article will also demonstrate separately from the reference corpus and the observation corpus.The Inaugural Addresses of the presidents of the United States was used as a reference corpus to analyze its linguistic features as a unique subject.Then according to the historical development of the United States,the Inaugural Addresses isdivided into six parts,namely six observation corpuses.The influence of time development on the use of words is observed through the comparison of six observation corpuses.First of all,in the description stage,the theory of measurement stylistics is used to analyze the stylistic features of the presidential Inaugural Addresses.From the vocabulary level,the words used are simple,the word length is short,and the repetition rate is high.From the length of the page,at the beginning the initial lengths are different.Then the presents have formed a stable form with short sentences,short speeches of about two thousand.Secondly,in the interpretation stage,combined with Halliday’s interpersonal function theory in systemic functional linguistics,this paper makes the Inaugural Addresses from two aspects: personal pronouns and modal auxiliary verbs.From the level of personal pronouns,“National We” uses the highest frequency.The use of “National We” has increased the emotional resonance of the people on the Inaugural Addresses.The most commonly used personal pronouns have also changed from “I” to “us”,which indicate the evolutionary process of people’s cognition of the effects of personal pronouns.From the level of modal auxiliary verbs,the median modal auxiliary verbs are used most frequently,expressing the sincere vision of the American president and showing the people the direction of future efforts.In addition,from a diachronic perspective,the frequency of use of high-value modal auxiliary verbs has gradually increased,indicating that as the United States becomes stronger,and the language level has become more powerful.Finally,in the explanation stage,the analysis is carried out at the level of the speech topic.From the word frequency level,it is mainly the high-frequency vocabulary of the people,the government,etc.Even the different frequency of use of vocabulary with similar semantics in different periods reflects the subtle changes of semantic emotions.From the perspective of the keywords in different periods,we can find out the influence of the process of social development on the focus of the article—focusing on the security of the armed forces to pay attention to the homeland to pay more attention to people’s livelihood issues,from caring about the internal affairs of the United States to focusing on the security and stability of the whole world.At the theoretical and methodological level,this paper combines Critical Discourse Analysis with corpus linguistics and uses python technology for interdisciplinary integration in data analysis.The aim is to combine qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis to arrive more accurate and specific conclusion.In addition,at the content level,the texts of all the Inaugural Addresses of the presidents of the United States are analyzed,and a deeper analysis is carried out on the diachronic level.Through the diachronic analysis of the presidentialInaugural Addresses,the ideology and development process behind the language can be unearthed,which is a good reference for a better understanding of political speech. |
