1. Introduction

1. General Opening

Political speeches are excellent evidence that demonstrates the natural development not only of language itself but also of the society, culture and religion to which they belong. The following is a linguistic analysis of six, second-term inaugural speeches delivered by six American presidents during the years 1833 - 1997. Specifically, speeches by three Democrats, Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and three Republicans, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley and Richard Nixon, were chosen as a representative sample of political rhetoric in the U.S. As linguist Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova suggests, “a political speech can be seen as a purposeful interaction between the speaker and the audience, in which the communicative intention of the speaker is to persuade the audience to accept the speaker’s views and support his/her suggestions” (Functions 7). It is this interaction of the speaker and the audience and the means of persuasion, particularly their evolution, which will be, among other things, the focus of this thesis. As times have changed, so have people, their language and their linguistic literacy. As a result, politicians have been naturally compelled to use such various persuasion tools that would satisfy the “the two central self-presentational concerns of pleasing the audience and constructing a public self” (Miller 72). By means of discourse analysis, the tools of persuasion in each speech will be compared and contrasted with the other five speeches. This analysis will demonstrate not only linguistic changes but also evolution in political rhetoric in the United States in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

2. The Topic of the Thesis

This thesis will focus on a discourse analysis of six political speeches, including lexical, grammatical, stylistic, discourse and pragmatic levels. Based on the findings, means of persuasion will be identified in each speech and compared and contrasted in order to identify a possible development or evolution in the language of rhetoric.

3. Hypothesis

Though created for the same purpose and delivered by a president, it is assumed that a political speech in 1833 was written differently than a speech in 1997. Various strategies, such as reference, presupposition, implication or inference are employed by the speaker in order to achieve the ultimate goal of persuasion. Mikael Assmundson agrees that, “speeches are made to convince, and orators use different tools to persuade the audience in order to attain their goal” (4). However, it is not only the means of persuasion of the speaker that change. It is primarily the audience that naturally outgrows certain values, opinions, outlooks or beliefs and forces the speaker to employ new convincing strategies. That said, “a well-known technique to accomplish this has been available for over 2,000 years, namely rhetoric” (4). Aristotle identified three main means of persuasion, ethos, pathos and logos, which have remained immune to time and keep their presence in all political speeches. Just how the persuasive needs of interlocutors have evolved over time will be described in this thesis. Presumably, the appeal towards, God, conscience, morals and ethics has been diminishing over time, being replaced with more simple, ‘greater good’ messages. Furthermore, long, subordinate sentences have been replaced with short, coordinate grammar, and formal, poetic language has been substituted with friendly, politically safe talk.

4. The Corpus

Six inaugural addresses, all given by presidents starting their second term serve as the corpus of the discourse analysis. For the sake of objective analysis, an equal mix of Republican and Democratic addresses has been selected, starting with Andrew Jackson in 1833, Abraham Lincoln in 1865, William McKinley in 1901, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937, Richard M. Nixon in 1973 and ending with Bill Clinton in 1997. All speeches are separated by approximately two to four decades, to evenly demonstrate the development of language over those 164 years. Each speech has approximately 2,000 words, except for the speech of Abraham Lincoln, which has only 708 words.

5. Methods

First, each speech will be analyzed on a discourse, lexical, grammatical, stylistic and pragmatic level. Then all six speeches will be compared and contrasted, showing statistical differences in tables and graphs, some of them generated by the software tool WordSmith. This software will be used to analyze text files of all the speeches, providing the following information: word count, frequency of words, length of sentences, and analysis of key words or contrastive pairs. Some of these results will also be placed into Microsoft Excel to produce colorful charts and graphs for better visual support. During the discourse and pragmatic analysis in particular, means of persuasion will be traced and later compared, proving or disproving the hypothesis.