摘要

 四年一度的美国总统大选总能引起全世界的瞩目，已落下帷幕的2008年第58界总统选举也不例外。经过非常激烈的角逐，巴拉克•侯赛因•奥巴马,凭借其精彩绝伦的演讲成为美国新任总统,他的演讲运用丰富的修辞手法，文章极具感染力。本文选取几篇他的著名公共演说，在语音、词汇等层面对其文体特征进行了深入地分析。本文探讨了演讲语篇中语言的选用效果，并揭示了奥巴马总统成功运用演讲语言的特点、策略和技巧，大量使用排比、比喻等修辞手法增强演讲的效果，赋予其极强的感染力，本文对奥巴马的几篇绝妙演讲进行修辞分析，以期为人们更好地理解演讲及更深层次地研究公众演说艺术提供帮助。

关键字：奥巴马; 演讲; 语音特征; 词汇特征; 语义特征

Abstract

As a typical symbol of American democracy, the quadrennial U.S. presidential election draws attentions from all over the world for a long history. The 58th presidential election makes no exception. After the competitive campaigns, Barack Hussein Obama became the new president of the United States by virtue of his excellent speeches, which has gained an appealing power and a great number of rhetorical devices skillfully used in it. Based on the analysis of the linguistic and stylistic features of his famous public speeches on the levels of phonology, semantic and syntactical characteristics, investigates the contextual factors, this thesis discuses the relations between the various use of language and the communicative effect and appropriateness in his speeches, and reveals some of the rhetoric characteristics, strategies and skills commonly applied by president Obama who constantly applied the rhetoric characteristics to enhance the effect of his public speeches, such as parallelism and metaphor, etc. The author mainly discuses the rhetoric analysis according to some selected speeches of president Obama, with the hope that it will enhance the comprehension of this speech to people and contribute to further studies on the art of public speaking.

Key words: Obama; Speeches; Phonological characteristics; Semantic characteristics; Syntactical characteristics

1. Introduction
   This thesis is organized in three parts. The first part provides brief introductions of English public speaking and Barack Obama. The second part builds a theoretic foundation to the thesis, exploring some researches on rhetoric and President Obama’s speeches. The third part focuses on the analysis of President Obama’s speeches according to phonology, semantic and syntactical characteristics.