A Comparative Analysis of the Keywords in Inaugural Addresses of U.S. Presidents from Both Parties 美国两党总统就职演讲内容关键词对比分析开题报告

1. 研究目的与意义（文献综述包含参考文献）

1.introductionthis chapter is an introduction to the whole thesis, which illustrates the background, the purpose and the structure of the study.1.1 background of the researchamerican presidential inaugural addresses（apias）, a type of public political speaking, are publicly delivered by the newly-elected presidents on inauguration day to the whole country and world. in the addresses, presidents lay out their administrative creeds and persuade the public to accept and support their ideas, which has had a significant impact worldwide and has become a major research hotspot. in previous studies, most scholars have focused on the apias from the perspective of genre, stylistic features, rhetoric, or critical discourse analysis and conducted a series of studies. besides, there are a few studies on keywords of apias, which has provided a new perspective for us.throughout the history of the united states, the two parties have fiercely competed against each other. the republican party mainly represents the upper middle class and the democratic party mainly represents the lower middle class. ideologically, the republican party tends to be conservative and lay more emphasis on maintaining individual freedom while the democratic party tends to be liberal, with more emphasis on human rights, social equality. in terms of internal policies, the republican party advocates reducing government power, opposing government intervention in economic and social issues, advocating lower taxes and social welfare, and reducing public spending（xiong, 2021）. the democratic party, on the contrary, advocates expanding the power of the government, which should actively solve various social and economic problems and increase social welfare. in terms of foreign policy, the republican party emphasizes more on american interests, and often promotes unilateralist policies, but the democratic party places more emphasis on promoting the values of human rights and social equality. therefore, the result of the u.s. congressional elections is seen as a weather vane of the changing political trends in american society, and the prevailing political trend represented by the winning party, becoming an important factor in predicting the governing policies of the new administration.1.2 purposes of the researchthe current study is aimed to compare keywords in inaugural addresses of u.s. presidents from both parties. the purposes of studies can be illustrated from the following two aspects.firstly, in the theoretical sense, the current study aims to find out the top ten keywords of the presidential inaugural addresses of the democratic party and the republican party, and then to compare and analyze the similarities and differences between the keywords of the presidential inaugural addresses of the two parties, so as to explore the similarities and differences of the ideological core and the policies of the two parties. in addition, the study aims to find out the causes of the similarities and differences of the keywords of the inaugural addresses, to further understand the two-party system in the united states.secondly, in the practical sense, figuring out the similarities and differences of the keywords in presidential inaugural addresses can gain insights into the construction of political parties and absorb more mature experience in its operation and use for reference, which is beneficial to the construction of our countrys political party.1.3 structure of the researchthe whole thesis is divided into five chapters. chapter one introduces the background of this research, and outlines the aims and organization of the study. the review of some previous studies on stylistic features of american presidential inaugural addresses and some studies about the keywords analysis on apias. chapter three illustrates research questions, methodology, software used and research procedures. chapter four discusses the results and explains the previous questions. chapter five summarizes the major findings and implications of the study, it also figures out the limitations and gives some suggestions for the future studies.2.literature reviewthis chapter introduces previous studies on american presidential inaugural addresses from the perspective of stylistics and some related studies about the keywords analysis of american presidential inaugural addresses.2.1 previous studies on stylistic features of american presidential inaugural addresses the american presidential inaugural addresses have captured much attention all over the world, and the content of the speech presents the ideology and spirituality of the united states as a nation, attracting many researchers to explore the texts of the inaugural addresses from different perspectives such as genre and stylistic features, and some scholars study the rhetoric, or discourse of the texts in a more detailed manner.trosborg (2000) adopts the genre analysis method to study the communicative purposes, the move structures and the rhetorical features, which provides some clues for researching political speeches, but a broader range of studies may be necessary for a better understanding in special situations.xiong (2004), from the perspective of stylistics, analyzes kennedys inaugural address from the aspects of lexis, syntax, rhetoric, and discourse. the stylistic features are beneficial for people to better appreciate kennedys speech and learn some linguistic techniques to improve the speech level. wang (2012) chooses 10 samples according to time intervals of 24 years from all the apias delivered by 44 american presidents from 1789 to 2008 and analyzes with detail from the dimensions of linguistic description, including lexical level, syntactic level, and textual level as well rhetorical devices and their rhetorical effectiveness, and reveals the general tendency that is reflected in the addresses. however, the stylistic analysis on the phonological level is not included in this thesis and the author does not analyze the contextual factors of these apias in more detailed manner, which can help go deeper in stylistic analysis of inaugural addresses. liu wu（2019）adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis of the latest five apias. based on burkes same theory, they try to study the rhetoric in these inaugural addresses in three aspects，including rhetorical content，rhetorical form and phonetic rhetoric and figure out how various rhetorical strategies help the speaker achieve identification with the audience and exploring the implications for english discourse teaching. tian (2019) studies the corpus of apias from 1901 to 2017 to identify the types of metaphors in apias and explore the effect of metaphors in them.gao (2010) explores the corpus of apias from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. the study also takes a diachronic and comparative view into the apias. although both are from the perspective of critical discourse analysis, wang (2019) adds thethree-dimensional framework model of fairclough, measurement stylistics and interpersonalfunction theory as the theoretical basis, and the nltk repository in python as the research tool to conduct a diachronic analysis of apias.2.2 previous studies on keywords of american presidential inaugural addressesbesides, there are a few studies on keywords of apias. dou a diachronical critical discourse analysis on the american presidential inaugural addresses. masters dissertation, fudan university.kasper, w., wouter, v. a., kenneth, b. (2017). text analysis in r. communication methods and measures, 11(4), 245-265.li, w. z. (2003). a clec-based analysis of key words and associates. modern foreign languages (quarterly), 26(3), 283-293.ren, r. f. (2011). a study on high-frequency words in college students english speeches. masters dissertation, hunan university.scott, m. (1997). pc analysis of key words - and key key words. system, 25(2), 233-245.tian, x. l. (2019). a corpus-based study of conceptual metaphors in american presidential inaugural addresses---from 1901 to 2017 us presidential inaugural addresses. masters dissertation, chongqing normal university.trosborg, a. (2000). analyzing professional genres. philadelphia: benjamins publishing.wang, g. h. (2012). stylistic analysis of inaugural addresses of american presidents. masters dissertation, changan university.wang, l. (2019). diachronic analysis of the american presidential inaugural addresses from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. masters dissertation, shenyang university of chemical technology.陈超（2010），中美顶尖研究型大学校长就职演讲内容的比较研究基于词频统计的分析，《国家教育行政学院学报》，(8)：86-90转76。

窦卫霖、唐健（2009），美国总统就职演说的话语分析从相关高频词看美国政治的延续性与时代性，《华东师范大学学报 (哲学社会科学版)》，(3)：51-55。

方乐（2010），主题词在演讲中的作用，《秘书》，（8）：36-38。

2. 研究的基本内容、问题解决措施及方案

3. Method3.1 Research questions The study will answer the following questions. (1) In terms of personal pronouns, what are the similarities and differences of the keywords between the presidential inaugural addresses of the two parties in the United States?(2) In terms of nouns, what are the similarities and differences of the keywords between the presidential inaugural addresses of the two parties in the United States?(3) In terms of modal verbs, what are the similarities and differences of the keywords between the presidential inaugural addresses of the two parties in the United States?3.2 Research materials The present study will choose APIAs of 30 presidents from Abraham Lincoln who won the election in 1860 and was the first president representing the Republican Party after the formal establishment of the two-party system in the United States to Joseph Robinette Biden who won the election in 2020, which has a total of 41 speeches. The materials contain 24 Republican speeches addressed by 17 presidents and 17 Democratic speeches addressed by 10 presidents. In order to compare the similarities and differences of the top 50 keywords of APIAs from the two parties, this research will build a mini corpus of 24 Republican speeches and a mini corpus of 17 Democratic speeches. According to statistics, the word count of the Republican corpus is 60,843 words and the word count of the Democratic corpus is 29,683 words.Here is a table showing the presidents of two parties respectively and the years of their inaugural addresses accordingly. Republican Party Democratic Party President Year of the address President Year of the address1 Abraham Lincoln 1861 Grover Cleveland 18852 1865 18933 Ulysses S. Grant 1869 Woodrow Wilson 19134 1873 19175 Rutherford B. Hayes 1877 Franklin D Roosevelt 19336 James A. Garfield 1881 19377 Benjamin Harrison 1889 19418 William McKinley 1897 19459 1901 Harry S. Truman 194910 Theodore Roosevelt 1905 John F. Kennedy 196111 William H. Taft 1909 Lyndon B. Johnson 196512 Warren G. Harding 1921 Jimmy Carter 197713 Calvin Coolidge 1925 Bill Clinton 199314 Herbert Hoover 1929 199715 Dwight D. Eisenhower 1953 Barack Obama 200916 1957 201317 Richard M. Nixon 1969 Joseph R. Biden 202118 1973 19 Ronald Reagan 1981 20 1985 21 George H. W. Bush 1989 22 George W. Bush 2001 23 2005 24 Donald J. Trump 2017 3.3 Research instruments Many domestic papers on the keywords analysis used modern corpus technology, such as WordSmith. In this paper, a new approach is adopted, which is combined with R language of computer technology for keywords analysis. Therefore, the current study will use R software (version 4.1.2) to compare and analyze the keywords of APIAs from the two parties. R is a free, open-source, cross-platform programming environment (Kasper, Wouter, Kenneth, 2017) and it has a wide range of packages that can be installed easily and safely within a single command, which can help us conduct the text analysis. The packages quanteda, and dplyr are required. Document-feature matrix (DFM) is one of the quantedas basic types of objects, which represents frequencies of features in documents in a matrix and therefore the top 50 keywords can be extracted based on it. Besides, dplyr can make the process simpler, clearer and more logical.All the APIAs will be pretreated before they are analyzed, each word will be programmed into lower case. Besides, numbers, punctuations, symbols, and hyphens need to be removed and stopwords which are used frequently but usually do not have significant meanings, are also removed to simplify the computation. Based on the former process, the meaningful top 50 keywords of the two parties can be extracted properly.The top 50 keywords will be compared from the perspectives of personal pronouns, nouns and modal verbs, which is similar to the categories in the research conducted by Luo (2011) who discusses the keywords of APIAs from the perspectives of first personal pronouns, nouns and some political words in his diachronic analysis. How to manage person pronouns is an important language skill in addresses and the nouns show the concerns of presidents of both parties. The reason why I add the modal verbs is because that they can convey the addressers implied ideology in order to help us find out the speakers intentional or unintentional thoughts, real attitudes and purposes. In this manner, the study will find out the similarities and differences of the governing thinking of the two parties to help us further understand the two-party system and policies of America.