Browsing by Author "Kuosmanen, Sonja"

The election of both John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama as the President of the United States is marked as a historical moment in which a young, charismatic candidate representing change prevailed over societal prejudice and rose to the top of the American political system. Nonetheless, these two men came from very different backgrounds and took office as the United States itself faced very different circumstances. This thesis examines national identity in Kennedy's and Obama's inauguration addresses by utilizing the tools of systemic-functional linguistics. The aim is not to determine a shared, unchanging form of national identity, but rather to examine the various ways in which it is represented in differing contexts. The speeches form the entirety of the material used in the analysis and are examined within a discursive framework in which social reality, and consequently also group identity, is constructed through ideologically charged expressions. Here, discourse is conceptualized in Norman Fairclough's terms as social practice through which societal structures are formed and changed. Power relations within the society create ideologically charged discourses with which groups differentiate themselves from one another and legitimize their existence. Unlike Fairclough, however, this work views these power relations in moral relativistic terms rather than as expressions of dominance, and as such ideology here is conceptualized primarily as a tool of legitimatization. Though the nation as an entity also has judicial and other aspects, here it is treated as a social group which bases its existence on the representation of a community shared by its members, and whose legitimacy is based on communicated ideological discourses and narratives. The inauguration address builds an idealized version of national identity in which the nation s internal ideological conflicts are hidden under rhetorical conformity. The speech is a discursive whole, combining conventions of the inauguration address as a genre, narratives central to national identity, and the president's own persona and rhetorical choices. Though the president delivers the address and is thus ultimately accountable for its content, the rhetorical choices available to him are constrained by both the established conventions of the genre and the current societal and political conditions at home and abroad. The analysis itself covers three elements of systemic-functional grammar - Theme, Subject, and process type - as well as lexical chains linked to three thematic subjects. These areas of investigation are used to compare representations made in the speeches in regards to actors, events and temporal orientation. The material shows that the rhetorically unifying "we" has a strong presence, and Themes and Subjects related to "us" are notably common in both speeches. Kennedy's focus is strongly on the role of the United States in global politics, his temporal descriptions are predominantly oriented towards the present and future, and his speech is marked by themes and expressions of armed conflict. Obama's speech, however, has a strong Thematic focus on societal and economic institutions, is temporally oriented to the present and past, and utilizes expressions of physical labor in methaphorical descriptions of the national past and future.