Speech and Types of Speech

F. Inaugural Address

Based on the types of speech discussed previously, inaugural address is an epideictic speech since it is delivered in inauguration ceremony. According to Kennon and Boller 2004: 5 the inauguration process is the ritual ceremony during which the executive power is peacefully transferred from president to president. The inauguration is a cyclical, regularly scheduled event held every fourth year and is based on the outcome of a democratic election. The regularity of the presidential inaugurations offers a sense of stability, continuity, and permanence to a political system that peacefully permits turnover in officeholders and change in policy agendas. Bell 2008: 200 says that the inaugural address is a genre of its own. It reflects and represents the things that the president finds important and if he expresses his ideas successfully, his address will go down in history as one that will stand up through the ages. The inaugural address is a part of a long tradition of inaugural addresses. For this reason the president cannot decide entirely by himself how he wants to compose the address or what he wants to talk about. The genre of inaugural addresses is the most strictly defined when compared to other genres used by presidents.

G. Barack Obama and His Second Inaugural Address

Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton’s army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank. He is the 44th President of the United States. He was firstly elected as the 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008. After his first term ended, he was elected for the second time and gave his second inaugural address on January 21, 2013. The theme of Barack Obama’s second inaugural address was “Faith in America’s Future”, a phrase that draws upon the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln ’s Emancipation Proclamation and the completion of the Capitol dome in 1863. The theme also stresses the “perseverance and unity” of the United States, and echoes the “Forward” theme used in the closing months of Obama’s reelection campaign. In his second inauguration speech, Obama proclaimed that “while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.” He called for laws to combat climate change, enactment of immigration reform and gun control. Obama stated that more progress was needed on human rights and civil rights including racial minority rights, womens rights, and LGBT rights and vowed to promote democracy abroad.

H. Previous Studies

There have been some research conducted which deal with stylistics in a speech. However, those research are different from this research in term of the objectives. One of the previous research entitles Stylistic Analysis of Barack H. Obamas Inaugural Address 2009 done by Rie Ito from Keio University, Japan. The research was firstly presented in The Asian Conference on Education 2012. The researcher states that this research is about „what was talked about and how it was delivered’ in President Barack H. Obama’s Inaugural Address 2009. In