- •Masaryk university brno
- •Content
- •1 Introduction
- •2 Theoretical part
- •2.1 Pragmatics
- •2.1.1 Syntax, semantics and pragmatics
- •2.1.2 Reference, inference, presupposition and entailment
- •2.2. Discourse
- •2.2.1 Discourse Analysis
- •2.2.2 Critical Discourse Analysis
- •2.2.3 The Role of Cohesion
- •2.2.3.1 Discourse, Context and Co-text
- •2.3 The Nature of Discourse and Political Speeches
- •2.3.1 Politics and its Theoretical Bases
- •2.3.2 Features of Political Participation
- •2.3.3 The Features of Spoken Political Speeches and their Gradual Changes
- •2.3.3.1 Changes of the Features of Political Speeches through the Time
- •2.3.3.2 The Influence of Media on Changes in Political Speeches
- •2.3.4 Problems of Analysis of Political Discourse
- •2.3.4.1 Some Features of Analysis of Political Discourse
- •2.3.4.2 Necessary Principles of Analysis of Political Discourse
- •2.3.5 The Presence of Power, Ideology and Persuasion in Political Speeches
- •2.3.5.1 Ideological Argumentation and Persuasion
- •2.3.5.2 Tolerance and Opposition to Persuasive Argumentation
- •2.4 The Position of the us in Contemporary World
- •2.5 Summary
- •3 Practical part
- •3.1 Corpus under Investigation
- •3.2 Scrutiny of all speeches
- •3.2.1 Obama's domestic speeches
- •3.2.1.1 Victory Speech
- •3.2.1.2 Inaugural Speech
- •3.2.1.3 Address to the Congress on February 24, 2009
- •3.2.1.4 State of the Union Address 2010
- •3.2.1.5 State of the Union 2011
- •3.2.2 Obama's Foreign Speeches
- •3.2.2.1 Remarks by President Obama at Strasbourg Town Hall;
- •3.2.2.2 Remarks by President Obama at a New Start Treaty Signing Ceremony and Press Conference
- •3.2.2.3 Remarks at the Meeting with Future Chinese Leaders
- •3.2.2.4 Remarks by President Obama at g20 Press Conference in Toronto,
- •3.2.2.5 Remarks by the President to Parliament in London
- •3.3 Comparison of the speeches
- •3.3.1 Comparison of Obama’s domestic speeches
- •3.3.2 Comparison of Obama`s Foreign Speeches
- •4 Comparison and conclusion
- •5 Bibliography
- •5.1 Primary Sources
- •5.2 Secondary Sources
2.2.3 The Role of Cohesion
The term reference has been explained so far with regards to pragmatics features of the discourse. It has, moreover, also a connection with the cohesive devices that join the text together and as thus they are a part of syntax which, as it has been demonstrated as well, is an aspect of language studies by CDA.
Cohesion has to be, above all, distinguished from coherence. These two features of discourse are loosely related one to another and one may predetermine the other. Nevertheless, coherence encompasses the unity of the whole discourse, i.e. the unity in the sense of meaning and communicative purpose which the reader or hearer perceives through discourse in a context of use; cohesion, on the other side, is connected with semantic and formal relations between all discourse elements which are dependent one to another because the interpretation of the meaning of one element is possible only with regards to the interpretation of the meaning of the other (Dontcheva-Navrátilová; ch. 5). Or as Halliday and Hasan have explained "we can interpret cohesion in practice as the set of semantic resources for linking a sentence with what has gone before (Halliday and Hasan 10).
It follows from what has been told that coherence relies just on the reader's/hearer's interpretation and that the coherence is, in this sense, a bit subjective; on the other hand cohesion is explicit and may be, with the help of its devices, thoroughly traced through the piece of text or discourse. This is always an objective task because there are always concrete elements to be defined. Moreover, to define cohesive devices helps also to define whether and how much the discourse is coherent.
2.2.3.1 Discourse, Context and Co-text
It has been stressed several times so far that the important element of the practical discourse analysis is the reference to the context in which the discourse is appearing. On the top of that it should be referred not only to the general context but also to so-called co-text. How may be these two terms distinguished one from the other?
Basically, everything that is referred to in the discourse is considered to be a context; nevertheless, if the referred item is inside the text or the discourse it has a linguistic reference and as that it is marked as a co-text or linguistic context. The context in its broader meaning, i.e. everything outside the text, is marked as the context of situation or extra linguistic context (Dontcheva-Navrátilová; Glossary). The co-text, moreover, helps to interpret the meaning because it simply narrows the possible interpretative meanings for particular word or sentence (Yule; ch. 3). These words or sentences would be misguiding for the analyst unless they are placed in the discourse environment; only then the analyst is able to decode their correct meaning and he may feel to be deceived otherwise (Halliday and Hassan 301).
The extra linguistic context operates within the domains of field, tenor and mode. The field, also referred as the domain, helps to narrow the interpretative meanings according to the activity (e.g. in our case political speech). The tenor defines the relations between the speaker/writer and hearer/reader, e.g. their statuses predetermine whether the discourse will be polite or familiar, formal or informal etc. And finally, the mode is predefined by variation according to the part the language is playing and according to the participants expectations in this situation; in other words, the key elements are the rules of written and spoken, interactive or non-interactive communication, but also the text structure and organization and communicative purpose of the writer/speaker (i.e. to deliver a speech). It is worth to point out that the identification of registers and styles is to a large extent dependent on domain. However, tenor and mode are highly important for both stylistics and discourse analysis (Dontcheva-Navrátilová; Ch. 2).
The context of situation, or the meaning which is gained from this context, furthermore, belongs to the culture rather than to the language (Caldas-Coulthard 35). It is not thus surprising that such analysis may be a hard task to do but responsible sociolinguistic researchers have proved that the order and structure may be found even in the situations where these phenomena had been perceived to be messy and on the periphery of previous analyses. Pragmatic rules, beside the fact that they deal with cultural standards such as formality or distance, point to more general assumptions about the social and culture environment. If they would not do this, they would seem to be meaningless (Keesing 28).