Obama’s Farewell address (2017 : a linguistic analysis

Abstract

This study is a linguistic analysis of Obama’s Farewell Address which was delivered in 2017. The central focus of this analysis is to highlight the different linguistic features used in this speech. Thus, the first aim is to pinpoint the different figures of speech that characterize Obama’s style such as alliteration, anaphora, hyperbole, metaphors, simile, oxymoron, personification and parallelism. Secondly, highlight some lexical semantic relations that exist in the text like synonymy, antonymy, repetition, metonymy and hyponymy. Finally, apply Leech’s Model of Linguistic Deviations (1969), usually applied on poetry, in the analysis of Obama’s final speech; this model is divided into eight main deviations which are as follows: phonological, lexical, grammatical, graphological, semantic, dialectal, register and historical period deviations...