How civil engineers can survive and thrive in the twenty-first century

This is an abridged transcript of the inaugural address of Ed McCann, who became the 157th President of the Institution of Civil Engineers on 2 November 2020. His online address consisted of a series of video presentations and interviews, and is available on the ICE website.

A Study of the Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy From the Perspective of Appraisal Theory

An Inaugural Address is a speech made by a speaker when he or she assumes a new position, stating his or her position, views and policies in light of domestic and international political and economic situations. Based on Martin's Appraisal Theory, this paper mainly uses the three subsystems of Appraisal Theory: Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation to explore and analyze the evaluative devices in Kennedy's Inaugural Address and its expression of the speaker's views and attitudes, and to fully reveal the reasons for the enduring popularity of this speech.

Transitivity Analysis of Joe Biden’s Inaugural Address From the Perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar

Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar provides a new perspective and method for political discourse analysis. This paper first introduces the research status of political discourse at home and abroad, and then elaborates three metafunctions of Systemic Functional Grammar, namely ideational function, interpersonal function as well as textual function. On this basis, this paper makes an in-depth transitivity analysis of the inaugural address of the 46th president of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden. Through profound research, this paper attempts to reveal how English language is applied to hide ideology in political speeches and how president Joe Biden uses various language features to persuade and inspire American people in order to reach his political purpose; at the same time, it also verifies the practicability of Systemic Functional Grammar in the analysis of political speech discourse.

Rhetorical Analysis of Joe Biden’s Inauguration Address

The inaugural speeches mark the beginning of a new term in office for a community or government leader, such as the president. This reaction must persuade the people to believe in the government and the programs will be enacted. This research aims at finding the rhetorical appeals of President Joe Biden's inaugural address on his inauguration as the 46th President of the United States. The research is based on Aristotle's theory called a rhetorical theory. The resercher employs descriptive qualitative as a methodology to analyze the data from the spoken utterances of the speech. The result shows that Joe Biden uses all of the Aristotelian rhetoric strategies in his inaugural address, which are: ethos, pathos, and logos. The data shows that Joe Biden uses pathos as 55% of his speech, followed by ethos 37%, and logos 8%.. Joe Biden skillfully used and implied Aristotle's rhetorical theory in his inauguration address to engage and build trust with the American people. From the analysis, the researcher has concluded that a good speaker can use all of the three elements of the rhetorical theory and imply them in the speech or writing.

“A Transformation in the Nature of Power”

This chapter examines the Vietnam War. Prior to President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to commit the United States to war in Indochina, the United States was avowedly committed to “pay any price, bear any burden,” in the famous words of President Kennedy’s inaugural address, to stop the spread of Communism around the world. Practically, this commitment required military capabilities that spanned the conflict spectrum, from enhanced counterinsurgency to flexible nuclear options, to check Communist aggression wherever it might occur. Yet warfighting in Vietnam revealed the unsustainability of this approach, prompting a far more limited international role for the U.S. military as local partners were expected to more equitably share the burdens of their own defense and Washington pursued détente with the Soviet Union alongside rapprochement with China.

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics on Lexical Cohesion in President Obama’s and President Buhari’s Inaugural Speeches

Numerous studies have revealed how Lexical Cohesion supported the fulfilment of political leaders’ persuasion intention in their rhetoric. The purpose of this study was to cross-culturally explore President Obama’s and President Buhari’s Inaugural Speeches to examine the impact of culture on the persuasive functions of Lexical Cohesion in their rhetoric. Therefore, while drawing on Pragmatics, the study adopted a qualitative discourse analysis approach, utilised an eclectic framework of Lexical Cohesion based on Hoey (1991), Martin (1992) and Eggins (2004) to analyse Obama’s and Buhari’s first inaugural speeches. The findings indicate, on one hand, that although Obama deployed more categories and more frequencies of Lexical Cohesion than Buhari did, ‘Repetition’ (50%) was the most dominant source of Lexical Cohesion in each of the two speeches. Moreover, the most reiterated item in the two speeches were personal pronouns, where Obama mostly repeated the pronoun ‘we’, which had inclusive function, and Buhari mostly repeated ‘I’ and the exclusive ‘we’. On the other hand, the findings suggest that Obama utilised Lexical Cohesion mainly for ‘emotional appeals’, ‘audience involvement’, and ‘credibility-building strategies’; while Buhari used Lexical Cohesion for ‘emphasizing his (and his team’s) personal commitment’, ‘building his credibility’, and ‘demonizing past administrations’. Finally, in the light of these findings, the study has drawn two major conclusions: (1) that on the preponderance of repetition of personal pronouns in both the two speeches, the findings suggest that the generic conventions of the use of personalised English in the inaugural address outweigh any culture-specific discourse practices of the two communities; (2) that Obama’s strategies of emotional appeals and audience involvement that enabled him to ‘speak along with his audience’, which contrast with Buhari’s strategies of emphasizing personal commitment and audience-exclusive tone that made him to ‘speak alone’, seem to have rendered Obama’s speech more interactional and more audience-engaging than Buhari’s speech.