On Rhetorical Mechanism of President Trump’s Speeches from the Perspective of Kenneth Burke's Identification Theory_英语论文

摘要

近十年来，肯尼斯·伯克的修辞理论被广泛应用到语篇分析当中。同一理论作为伯克修辞学的关键，更是被广泛应用于分析广告，演讲，和新闻。基于肯尼斯·伯克的同一理论，本论文选取了特朗普的就职演讲及2017年1月20日至2018年12月期间的21篇每周新闻演讲并对其修辞机制进行分析。首先通过伯克的同一理论来探索特朗普如何在演讲中运用不同的认同策略，即同情认同、对立认同、不准确认同来忽略彼此之间的差异，获得听众的认同。其次，本文将语料分为经济，民生，军事和安全四个主题，并分析每个主题中三个同一理论策略的分布特点及造成此分布特点的原因。

本文通过对特朗普演讲进行修辞机制的分析，揭示特朗普如何通过不同的演讲策略有效地解决分歧，实现同一，引导民众认同且信任他的政策方针，从而更全面深入地探究政治性演讲的修辞机制。本研究还旨在证明伯克新修辞理论在政治演讲语篇分析中的适用性与可行性，同时为读者提供分析方法，以便更好地理解与发掘政治演讲中演讲者的真正目的与隐藏动机。

关键词：伯克修辞理论  同一理论  特朗普总统演讲

Abstract

Kenneth Burke’s Rhetoric has been widely used in discourse analysis in the last decades. As the key term of Burke’s Rhetoric, Identification has an extensive application in advertisements, news reports, speeches and instructional books. On the basis of Kenneth Burke’s Identification Theory, this dissertation selects the inaugural speech as well as 21 typical weekly TV speeches between January 20th, 2017 and December, 2018 of Donald Trump , the President of the United States of America to make an analysis of their rhetorical mechanism. In the first place, we try to explore how Identification Theory is employed into Trump’s speeches. In the second place, we divide his speeches into four types: economy, people’s livelihood, security and military, studying the distribution of Burke’s identification strategies which include identification by sympathy, identification by antithesis and identification by inaccuracy in each type of speeches and the possible reasons for them. 

Through analyzing the rhetorical mechanism, the research aims to discover how President Trump creates a shared belief, experience and value, gain trust and get audience’s identification in his speeches to prove the feasibility of Burke’s new rhetoric theory in discourse analysis of political speeches. Meanwhile, we hope that this paper can provide an analytical method for readers to have a better understanding of the speakers’ genuine intentions and hidden motives in political speeches.

Key words: Burke’s rhetoric  Identification  President Trump’s speeches

Contents

Chapter One  Introduction1

1.1  Research Background1

1.2  Purpose & Significance of the Thesis.2

1.3  Structure of the Thesis.3

Chapter Two  Literature Review4

2.1  Previous Studies on Burke's Rhetoric.4

2.1.1 Previous Studies on Kenneth Burke4

2.1.2 Previous Studies on Burke’s Identification Theory.5

2.2  Previous Studies on Political Speeches.7

2.3  Summary.8

Chapter Three  Theoretical Framework.9

3.1  Overview of Kenneth Burke's Rhetoric.9

3.2  Identification Theory10

3.2.1 Identification by Sympathy10

3.2.2 Identification by Antithesis.11

3.2.3 Identification by Inaccuracy.12

Chapter Four  Rhetorical Research on President Trump's Speeches.13

4.1  Research Questions.13

4.2  Data Collection.13

4.3  Data Analysis15

4.3.1 The Distribution of Identification in Speeches of Economy.15

4.3.2 The Distribution of Identification in Speeches of People's Livelihood17

4.3.3 The Distribution of Identification in Speeches of Security.20

4.3.4 The Distribution of Identification in Speeches of Military.23

4.3.5 The Overall Distribution of Identification in President Trump's speeches.25

Chapter Five  Conclusion29

5.1  Major Findings29

5.2  Implication30

5.3  Limitations30

Bibliography

Acknowledgements