Grammatical and Lexical Cohesion: Their Contribution to Rhetorical Effect of Barack Obama’s Presidential Inaugural Address

The inaugural address is a genre of its own which could express presidents’ ideas successfully, therefore, could stand up for ages in the heart of their residents. Barack Hussein Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008.  Being aware of its importance after presidential selection, his first Inaugural Address calling for a "new era of responsibility" was given on January 20, 2009 marking the commencement of his first four-year term as President. This paper aims at highlighting not only grammatical but also lexical cohesion in terms of discourse and power that have a contribution to rhetorical effect of the first half of his inauguration speech. The analysis of cohesion in this political speech is based on the cohesion model found in Halliday and Hasan (1976). From the perspective of grammatical cohesion, conjunctions, reference, ellipsis and substitution are the four mainly used categories. In terms of lexical one, collocations and repetition appear most frequently.

Keywords: Barack Obama; grammatical cohesion; lexical cohesion; Presidential Inaugural Speech; rhetorical effect.