Taking a Marked Stance through Evaluative Lexical Items: A Study of Selected Features of Obama’s and Trump’s Inaugural Speeches

The paper presents an analysis of Obama’s and Trump’s inaugural addresses with a view to evidencing how language can be manipulated and also reveal the speaker’s political and ideological stance through the use of marked and evaluative lexical items. The language sample selected for analysis contains personal pronouns and possessive adjectives ‘you, your, we, us, our, ours, ourselves, they, their, them, themselves’, determiner ‘other’ and the term ‘America’ with all its derivative forms as used in the two speeches.

Are American Presidents Becoming Less Rhetorically Complex? Evaluating the Integrative Complexity of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in Historical Context

Are American political leaders becoming simpler in their rhetoric? To evaluate, in the present study we place the two most recent U.S. presidents’ integrative complexity against a historical context for three different types of comparable materials: Presidential Debates, Inaugural Addresses, and State of the Union (SOTU) speeches. Results overwhelmingly suggest that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are historically simple when compared to the typical president, and that is true both across parties and within their own political party. Further, segmented regression analyses suggest that part of the reason for Biden’s and Trump’s low complexity is the continuation of an ongoing historical decline in complexity among Presidents that began in 1960. However, each president uniquely defies this trend on one material type: Biden is a historical outlier for his low-complexity debates, and Trump is a historical outlier for his low-complexity inauguration speech. Taken as a whole, these data suggest that although American presidents have been declining in complexity, both Biden and Trump are nonetheless uniquely low in complexity in some ways – possibly for reasons that are different for each president.

To Predict or to Memorize: Prominence in Inaugural Addresses

The assignment of phrasal prominence has been variously attributed to syntactic structure, part of speech, predictability, informativity, and speaker's intent. A recent account asserts that prominence is memorized on a by-word basis as Accent Ratio (AR), the likelihood that a word is accented (Nenkova et al. 2007). We examined whether AR outperforms the traditional predictors, in particular syntax and informativity, and if not, whether the traditional predictors shed light on the variance left unexplained by AR. We used a corpus of spoken American English consisting of the first inaugural addresses of six recent American presidents, hand-annotated for stress by two native English speakers. Regression models fitted to the data revealed that AR, syntax, and informativity all independently matter. Dividing the data into high-prominence and low-prominence tokens further revealed that AR and informativity are significant among low-prominence words, but only syntax is significant among high-prominence words. We conclude that although AR is a highly successful predictor, certain aspects of phrasal prominence require reference to syntax and informativity.

Stylistic hallmarks of Obama's (2009) and Al-Maliki's (2006) inaugural addresses

In inaugural addresses, presidents (e.g. Obama and Al-Maliki) intend to convey their intentions and plans and to announce their new political strategies in order to convince the public to accept and support them. To attain such purposes, they have often recourse to shrewd selection of linguistic elements and manipulation of rhetorical devices. Thus, this paper aims to investigate the stylistic hallmarks utilized in Obama's and Al-Maliki's Inaugural Addresses, focusing on the roles realized by these hallmarks in delivering the intended messages. Obama's (2009) and Al-Maliki's (2006) Inaugural Addresses have been selected to be the data of the study. For the data analysis, a qualitative method involving the identification of the most prominent stylistic features is followed. The paper concludes that both Obama and Al-Maliki resort to different stylistic features and devices with relatively different degrees. This slight diversity of this use seems to be due to the nature of the two languages and to the different goals sought by the two speakers. Moreover, metaphor, repetition, parallelism and metonymy are the more dominant devices in Obama's Address than in Al-Malik's. Simile is only observed in Obama's address.

Stylistic hallmarks of Obama's (2009) and Al-Maliki's (2006) inaugural addresses

In inaugural addresses, presidents (e.g. Obama and Al-Maliki) intend to convey their intentions and plans and to announce their new political strategies in order to convince the public to accept and support them. To attain such purposes, they have often recourse to shrewd selection of linguistic elements and manipulation of rhetorical devices. Thus, this paper aims to investigate the stylistic hallmarks utilized in Obama's and Al-Maliki's Inaugural Addresses, focusing on the roles realized by these hallmarks in delivering the intended messages. Obama's (2009) and Al-Maliki's (2006) Inaugural Addresses have been selected to be the data of the study. For the data analysis, a qualitative method involving the identification of the most prominent stylistic features is followed. The paper concludes that both Obama and Al-Maliki resort to different stylistic features and devices with relatively different degrees. This slight diversity of this use seems to be due to the nature of the two languages and to the different goals sought by the two speakers. Moreover, metaphor, repetition, parallelism and metonymy are the more dominant devices in Obama's Address than in Al-Malik's. Simile is only observed in Obama's address.

The Concept of “New Life” as a Powerful Psycholinguistic Element in the Inaugural Addresses of the U.S. Presidents

The article deals with the concept of “new life” in the inaugural addresses of the U.S. presidents. A political language, as a reflection of people’s behavior in a certain ethnocultural community, is under the consideration. The investigation of political language caused the special approach to the analysis of lexical units that comprise the semantic group “novelty”. Based on this analysis a group of words that have the common sema “new” was singled out. The means of expressions and stylistic devices that presidents used to express the idea of “new life” were determined. The presidents make people believe in their ability to take new actions and change the situation, lead the nation to new, better life. Adjective “new” is often used by the presidents in context of the necessity to revitalize old values, to renew the nation spiritually. Analysis of inaugural address of American presidents showed that ideas of “new life” run through the entire speech of every president. In this article the role of the idea of “new life” in inaugural addresses of American presidents and means of its conveying has been studied. Model of a “new life” can be rather complex, needs more or less strong argumentation. The very word-combination the “better life” predetermines that this life should be different from the existing one, i.e. new. Thus concept of “new life” plays important role in political discourse. Consequently, our research may be understood not only as belonging to a narrow sphere of analysis of political discourse but to wider branch of science – linguistic political science.

Analysis of Jokowi’s Commissive Speech Acts in 2014 and 2019 Inaugural Address: A Pragmatic Study

This article attempted to identify and describe the commissive acts in the inaugural addresses delivered by the Indonesian president Joko Widodo in 2014 and 2019. This includes the felicity condition of the addresses. The differences between commissive speech acts produced in his inauguration address and the second terms were also contrasted. The data were the transcripts of the addresses in both terms. Descriptive qualitative was implied in this study. The results found that there were two categories of commissive acts in the first term and four in the second term. In contrast with the first term which was only 11, in his second term he uttered 15 commissive acts. The results concluded that to maintain people’s trust in his second term, the speaker proposed more commissive acts than in the first term.

Ideological discursive formations in an emerging democracy

The inaugural address has received a fair bit of scholarly attention due to the strength in the argument that it occupies an important position amongst discourses that can be termed political; and of course, the recognition that it performs an important political function within the state. The primary interest in the inaugural address has mainly been from the field of rhetoric and composition. This study approaches the inaugural from a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) perspective that allows for an examination of the discourse of governance as it is ideologically expressed in the inaugural address. Four (4) inaugural addresses of four (4) presidents within Ghana’s Fourth Republican tradition were purposefully selected to create a mini corpus for the study. Using the dialectical relational approach and drawing specifically on the concepts of subject positioning, agency in discourse and intertextuality, the analysis examines the ideological discursive formations of governance expressed in the inaugurals as discourse types as well as looks at the issues of subject positioning and agency and their ideological implications in the inaugural addresses. The analysis reveals that though there is an extent to which the ideological discursive formation of collectivism has been naturalised in the addresses, there exist differences in terms of how the subject is characterised within this collectivism. It also reveals that there are differences in how the principals of the two political traditions express agency within the addresses. We argue that these differences do construct and are constrained by the different ideological discursive formations of the two political traditions that have dominated Ghana’s political space.