Biden's Inaugural Address (2021)

Abstract

After the president was sworn as the 46th president of the USA, Biden delivered his inaugural address on January 20th, 2021, at Washington D. C. This inauguration ceremony was completely different from the previous ones as it witnessed a number of cascading crises that threatened the whole country. In the present study, we treated the themes along with the ideologies and beliefs that were embedded in this speech, by relying on Van Dijk’s Model of “Discourse Structures” (1980). The ultimate aim of this research is to identify the discourse structures namely Macrostructures (i.e., the themes of the speech), Microstructures (i.e., semantic, stylistic, syntactic and rhetoric analyses), as well as the Superstructures (i.e., the schema or plan of the discourse). Concerning research methods, we opted for a mixed-method, where we used the quantitative method for frequencies and tabulations of the lexical choices and structures, as well as the qualitative method for the thematic and schematic analyses of this political discourse. The findings of the present analytical study reveal that 1) the president used a powerful language to emphasise on Unity and Democracy throughout the whole speech. 2) His ideologies are completely contrastive to the former’s president. Besides, he showed that he does not hold any negative attitude towards immigrants and Islam, but he is against racism, terrorism, and white supremacy. 3) He emphasised on the current period more than past and future as it is shown in the results of our syntactic analysis. 4) Also, he praised for unity, showed resilience, tolerance and respect for people’s differences and for the parties with different political ideologies. Hence, many lexical items and syntactic structures emphasised the significance of unity. 5) Moreover, his ultimate objective was to bring America back to restoration from the tremendous issues threatening the unity of the nation. 6) The president intelligently employed parallel structures and functional repetitions as persuasive techniques to highlight his intentions and plans and to gain a pleasing and a positive impression of the audience. 7) Furthermore, Biden eloquently promoted his ideologies and beliefs through the use of the figurative language like metaphors, personifications, epithets, antitheses …, among others. 8) Finally, he used several sound devices namely alliterations, assonances and consonances which made the tone of the speech optimistic, memorable and beautifully rhyming.