A Stylistic Analysis of Joe Biden's Inaugural Political Speech

Abstract

In this paper, a stylistic approach has been used to investigate the linguistic features of President Joe Biden's inauguration political speech. Special importance is given to its linguistic characteristics that affect the structure of the selected political speech. This paper is an attempt to highlight the political language of Biden’s political speech.  The aim is to seek out how political speeches are packaged to persuade citizens and readers and how stylistic analytical tools assist readers in interpreting the language of Biden in the selected speech. The data has been collected from Time Magazine. The data selection is restricted to Biden's inauguration political speech and has been chosen based on certain foregrounding features that indicate a powerful stylistic effect on readers. The qualitative method has been used to analyze the selected data. In the analysis, some linguistic features, such as graphological, syntactic, grammatical deviations, transitivity, and modality have been used to investigate the style of the selected speech to reveal persuasion. The findings show that Biden's inauguration political speech achieves power, and persuasion through the use of certain stylistic features including lexical and grammatical categories such as abstract nouns, personal pronouns, mental processes, and certain modal auxiliaries. It is concluded that the lexical items that Biden uses are crucial in passing his message to his nation. However, the tendency to use distinctive foregrounding features in the consistent repetition of lexical items and sentence structures are stylistic technique used by Biden for the sake of persuasion.