Lingua Inglese - Laurea Magistrale 12010/2011

Final Exam (Boyd)

For the final exam you have to analyze a political speech by a famous American or British politician (or Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, or any speech that was originally given in English). First you need to find a speech that you are interested it and have it approved by Prof. Boyd (). You must first describe the broad context of the speech (history, culture, time, place, etc.) and then analyze the speech from a linguistic point of view. In your analysis you should consider some (but not necessarily all) of the following:

  • cohesion/coherence, including a discussion of cohesive devices, anaphora/cataphora, endophoric vs. exophoric reference, etc.;
  • syntax and syntactic structure (complex vs. simple, theme/rheme structure, etc.;
  • metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, and other rhetorical figures (personification, simile, etc.); you can also look at cognitive metaphors (such as, e.g., life is a journey; politcs is a battle, etc.);
  • lexis and lexical/semantic groups,
  • grammatical usage and forms: e.g. the use of pronouns (I vs. we; us vs. them; third-person pronouns and other inclusive/exclusive strategies, modality for (non-) commitment, deixis, etc.);
  • in terms of classical rhetoric (judicial, deliberative, epideictic) and what kind(s) of rhetoric are exhibited in the speech (generally they are mixed in modern political communication);
  • intertextuality and historical, religious, cultural allusion;
  • in terms of genre and sub-genres (what kind of political speech is this an example of in terms of genre AND sub-genre?);
  • use of other rhetorical devices generally found in speeches, such as, e.g., repetitions, contrastive pairs, rhetorical questions, register shifting and colloquialism (‘down-shifting’ to address the audience), etc.

Remember that you will not be able to analyze all of these things so choose the ones that you find most pertinent in your speech. Furthermore, you will not be able to analyze the entire speech, so choose only a part or small parts.

Your written analysis should be 2-3 typed pages, 1.5 spaces and NO MORE! Please submit a printed version by 24 May 2010. There will be a short oral exam about your analysis during the firstten days of June. Check the lettori site for more details.

Do not copy anything from the Internet (something that is very easy for me to determine if you have done so). If I discover that you have copied you will have to do the entire exercise over again and resubmit in September!

Make sure youhave read P. Chilton “Text Linguistics” and R. Wodak “Language and Politics”, which are available at Pronto stampa.

NB: You cannot analyze Obama’s ‘Speech on Race’ (‘A More Perfect Union’, March 2008).