The functions of stylistic inversion in modern political speeches
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ŢEPLIC, Tatiana. The functions of stylistic inversion in modern political speeches. In: Integrare prin cercetare şi inovare.: Ştiinţe umanistice , 10-11 noiembrie 2014, Chișinău. Chisinau, Republica Moldova: Universitatea de Stat din Moldova, 2014, R, SU, pp. 64-67.
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Integrare prin cercetare şi inovare.
R, SU, 2014
Conferința "Integrare prin cercetare şi inovare"
Chișinău, Moldova, 10-11 noiembrie 2014

The functions of stylistic inversion in modern political speeches


Pag. 64-67

Ţeplic Tatiana
 
Moldova State University
 
Disponibil în IBN: 8 aprilie 2020


Rezumat

Language is a means of communication but it has also been a powerful weapon of affecting the social environment from the ancient times. Political leaders manipulate words to make people trust their ideas and behave in a certain way. The analysis of the language phenomena used in the speeches of the modern politicians provides better understanding of the processes happening in everyday live and ensures critical attitude of the people toward the decisions taken by the government bodies. One of the tools of creating a desirable effect upon the audience is the use of inverted word order. Syntactical structure of the English sentence follows the fixed rules of the language and serves as one of the main means of expressing ideas. The English language is distinguished by a strict word order according to which the subject is placed before the predicate in the declarative sentence. According to Wallwork A. “the subject maintains the most important information” [6, p.16] and, hence, it should occupy initial position, before relating the information about it. The unnatural flow of information gets the reader or listener confused. Still, non-SVO word order is found very often in different genres of writing. It is a heuristic devise for creating coherent and cohesive representation of the text.  Ward G. and Birner B. state that: “The term inversion denotes any clause in which the logical subject appears in post verbal position while some other, canonically post verbal, constituent appears clause-initially” [7, p. 36]. The stylistic inversion according to Gurevich V. is a deliberate change of the order of words in a sentence to make one of them more conspicuous, important, or emphatic. That is, the change in the juxtaposition of the members of the sentence does not indicate structural meaning but has some super-structural function. Stylistic inversion aims at attaching logical stress or additional emotion, a specific intonation pattern is the inevitable satellite of inversion [2, p. 41]. Shakhovsky V. points out that the syntactical structure of the utterance arrangement is considered as the decisive problem in stylistic analysis. Syntactic means the same as lexical or phonological can make the sentence diverse and one element emphatic. He continues that the English declarative sentence is regarded as neutral if it is arranged with accordance to the regular word order with the nucleus of a sentence and any other order of the parts of the sentences may carry some new information but the effect on the reader or listener will be different [5, p. 253]. Hence, this technique is used by many male and female speakers in their struggle for the attention of the audience at different political events. Peter Kunsmann in his “Gender, Status and Power in Discourse Behavior of Men and Women” writes that gender and status combined are the determinant factors in the language use [3]. Therefore, the task of the present investigation is the analysis of the inversion use in the speeches of two modern political leaders of the almost similar status but different gender. The work is based on the study of fourteen texts of Barack Obama‟s and Hillary Clinton‟s speeches. As the data analysis has shown the ratio of full inversion usage in Barack Obama‟s discourse is higher than that in Hillary Clinton‟s speeches. In her turn Hillary Clinton uses partial inversion more often than Barack Obama. At the same time it should be mentioned that the American president follows full inversion patterns almost three times more often than the partial inversion structures (41% to 16%) while the distribution of these phenomena in Hillary Clinton‟s speeches is rather symmetrical (22% to 23%).  Moreover these two orators prefer different patterns of grammatical inversion. The introductory there/here counts the highest number of examples in the speech of both orators (34 in Barack Obama‟s speech and 21 in Hillary Clinton‟s one). Hillary Clinton, in comparison with Barack Obama, uses general and wh-questions more often. As for the other patterns, the only example of disjunctive question was found in Hillary Clinton‟s speech while inversion after conjunctions as, nor, neither, nor and inversion in the sentence of proportional agreement are characteristic to the Barack Obama discourse. In the speeches of both politicians the most frequently used pattern is the placement of the adverbial modifier at the head of the sentence (about 32%). The next in its usage frequency pattern in Hillary Clinton‟s speech is the assignment of the prepositional object to the head of the sentence (8%). Barack Obama uses this pattern only in one of the cases of stylistic inversion. Finally, fronted direct object is met five times: three examples in Barack Obama speeches and two in Hillary Clinton speeches. As to the fronted placement of adverbial modifiers it was detected that the highest ratio shows the adverbial modifier of time and it is almost equal in use by both orators (47 out of 63 instances).  E. g.: “For many years, as you've heard, this Center has been providing care for the people of this community including many of those most in need …” [1]. It should be mentioned that the adverbial modifier now was most often used in inversion, followed by the adverbial modifiers tonight and today. this creates the atmosphere of endless challenges the people face and emphasizes the awareness and the enrolment of the politicians in the everyday life of the audience as well as the decisive role of the people in the processes happening in the country. E.g.: “Tonight you voted for action, not politics as usual.” [4]. The analysis of the deliberative, epideictic, and ceremonial discourses of the orators has shown that in the deliberative speeches the grammatical and stylistic inversion is used considerably more often than in epideictic discourse. It can be explained by the fact that this type of discourse structurally presupposes the use of the logos appeal to the audience which is the most emotionally colored part of the speech. From the data analysis it was established that Barack Obama uses the grammatical and stylistic inversion in exposition and in argumentative section of such speeches. These are the most important parts of political discourse and therefore the orator directs all his efforts in order to make the speech prominent, persuasive and eloquent. Still, we can say that Hillary Clinton‟s and Barack Obama‟s speech arrangement is similar and they use the same appeal forms in every section of the speech. Barack Obama uses more often the phenomenon of inversion than Hillary Clinton does. The quantitative difference between stylistic and grammatical inversion in the discourses of Barack Obama reveals the fact that a male speech is more emotional in the world of politics that the female one. Women in this sphere of life are expected to acquire more “masculine” features, but there were not found aggressive tints expressed by inversion in Hillary Clinton‟s speeches. Thus we may conclude that female assertive behavior is expressed by some other stylistic devices.