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Chapter One
Introduction
1 .1 Purpose and Significance of the Present Study
Throughout the history of civilization, public speaking has always played an important role in Western political life. A brilliant speech shows a person's extensive knowledge, elegant manner, flexible reaction and humorous appealing. It is well known that a presidential inaugural address is a very important part of the inauguration ceremony of the United States. It is a crucial moment that the newly sworn-in president elaborates his political views in order to boost the morale of people, show his charisma and establish his personal image to the whole country and, for that matter, to the whole world. It might not be exaggerating to say that inaugural addresses are the realistic, comprehensive and specific recordings of history, shaping an epitome of the development of United States. Obviously, a comparatively systematic study of American presidential inaugural addresses is of great significance to our understanding of the United States and American culture.
The presidential inaugural address is a sub-type of public political speaking and is linguistically a genre with special characteristics. According to Whitman and Foster, public speaking is "a form of public communication in which one individual (a speaker) intentionally and overtly attempts to affect others (an audience) through sustained oral discourse (a speech)" (cf. Dai Xiaoyun, 2004:5). In the Western world, there is a long tradition of studying public speaking and practicing it. Like other forms of public speeches, presidential inaugural addresses are of "mixture" type: written to be spoken and, almost always, on formal occasions. They incorporate features of spoken language into those of formal written language and contain the most common characteristics of public political speeches (Dai Xiaoyun, 2004:6).
American presidential inaugural addresses generally aim to maintain social stability and government's smooth transitional functioning. They are American-oriented, strategy-oriented and spirit-oriented (Pan Liping, 2006:1). Moreover, they personalize the group beliefs and embody ideologies of their parties and country. The role of inaugural addresses is to propagate the dominant ideological definitions and representations, which are not neutral, but socially constructed with many culturally dominant assumptions of the society. Therefore, they inevitably bear a strong opinion of national power will and disclose the ideologies therein (Pan Liping, 2006:1).
In a presidential inaugural address, every president is expected to expound his ideals of governing the country, to analyze the difficulties and challenges the country faces, and to proclaim his own administrative polices. A comprehensive survey of American presidential inaugural addresses will reveal that with the increasing international exchanges between the United States and the rest of the world, foreign policy has taken up an increasingly significant proportion in presidential inaugural addresses. Generally speaking, the foreign policies of a country are determined by multiple factors, the f本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。