Analysis of Obamas Speeches

Analysis of Obamas SpeechesAbstractPresident Obama is known to shift sort during his dustupes through his tenure. The appearance-shift of the President Obama spoken language suffer de noned to the sense of hearing. As played in the research, President Obama does deliberately use the Afri understructure the States mutual slope variant in the speech enchantment speaking to the Black earreach. save the African America Vernacular side of meat variants can alike be sighted in his speech in take c atomic number 18 of the non-black audition which can denote to his speaking way. One can also deduce that President Obama make style-shift to affiliate himself with the audience retentivity his individual identity intact. At the very(prenominal) time, he chooses a certain style-shift in order for the audience to down the stairsstand and relate to his speech.IntroductionFor a ample time, the impression of style adopted by a person in speech has been a topic of debate among th e sociolinguistics. Researches stir tried to pin phase merely what is the constitution of style and why do people use a specific style in a gathering. Style has many meaning for the sociolinguistics. For some, it operator the choice of speech an individual makes when communicating with other. However, every i is agreed on the point that an individual changes his/her speaking style based on the audience and the topic under discussion. In this context, one can also define style as a code chosen for a specific discussion. The code includes the tone of an individual, the condition chosen and the structure of the sentences etc. (Bell, p.145-147)However, style is also dependent on the dialect of the speaker. It can be regiolect or sociolect. The idea is that every person speaks in a diverse style which is based on who they are and where they belong from. However, within in specific dialectal style, a speaker can chose divergent style to speak based on the audience, environment and topic etc. This places the complexity of the concept behind style. On the other hand, there is another concept known as style shifting which is closely related to style. For example when a speaker jump-starts to talk in the local language, he/she is trying to take a crap closeness with the audience. (Bell, p.145-147)In United States, the style-shift in President Obamas speeches is under great debates. People choose generally noticed that there is noticeable different in the pronunciation of President Obama in different speeches. The variation in the pronunciation is a debate-topic between both analysts and academics. It has been interpreted as the indexical of African America Vernacular English. It can be said that President Obama has the ability to shift elegantly and comfortably from standard American English (white) to black language. This make-up evaluates the hypothesis raised publicly and academically for Obamas speech i.e. president engages in style shifting. The followi ng sections pull up stakes describe the methods and utilise for evaluating the hypothesis. Furthermore, the write up leave alone also discuss the result and discuss the outcomes in a separate section.MethodsIn order to evaluate the style shifting in Obamas speech, the penning go out use quad speeches of President Obama between January 2008 and September 2011. The speeches which will be evaluated are Congressional Black Caucus Foundation which will be referred as blood profile speech at Hampton University which will be referred as Hampton University Kings perform speech and A More Perfect Union. The speeches chosen for the analysis cover the same topic therefore to make sure that be of external pointor affecting the speech are minimized while making audience as the only governing factor of the speeches. The number of speeches for analysis is kept four as to keep the limited scope of the paper in mind. As the purpose of the paper is to identify the possible linguistic featu res employ by President Obama therefore there are terms used throughout the paper AAVE which denotes to the ethnolect called African America Vernacular English and GAm which denotes to General (standard) English which is non-ethically marked variant of American English. (Detert, Rasmussen and Kristensen, p.7)The first step in to start the analysis of the fours speeches to find a result for the hypothesis. This includes analyzing and marking the speech for the phonetic variables which can reveal variables that can be identified as indexical of African American Vernacular English. For the purpose, a computer software known as ELAN is used. ELAN is sound processing software. It dishs in marking utterances in a speech and annotating the utterances with different values. However the system is not able to detect the phonetic varietys in the speech. Therefore the phonetic difference will be evaluated by the listeners. (Detert, Rasmussen and Kristensen, p.7)The ELAN software has been use to mark and annotate all the variables in the question (see Appendix A). Each variable has been assumption a value. The variables have also been marked within the categories i.e. General American English or African America Vernacular English. For example, if there is an annotation with an (ING) variable in the speech, the categorical annotation marks the annotation as either GAm or African America Vernacular English. The marks give us the ratio that helps refer between the two categories. The ratios will give us a statistical view of the number of occurrences of the variables in the speech. Furthermore, the paper also investigates the vowel used in the speech in a limited scope. (Detert, Rasmussen and Kristensen, p.8)ResultsThe research is focused on finding whether the variants indexical of African America Vernacular English is due to inbred flow or is triggered intentionally. The aim was to determine whether there is a relative progression in the use of African America Vernacu lar English variants in the speeches as it would reject the hypothesis i.e. to use African America Vernacular English for achieving strategic goals by President Obama. To analyze the fractures, each speech was divide into a ten minute intervals. Unfortunately the proficiency did not provide an accurate evidence of the relative progression i.e. highlighting the (HAPPY) tokens by retrieving only the orthographic y words did not draw any significant progression in variants. Furthermore, the retrieval of (HAPPY) vowels at the end of an utterance which is followed by a piteous pause did not draw an significant result too. Despite the fact that each speech and each ten minute interval has been closely analyze for number of possibilities, the author could not find any relative progression of the use of African America Vernacular English in the speeches. Therefore the technique will not be pursued any further.Any other important factor that influences the use of variants indexical of Afri can America Vernacular English is the topic of the speech. In order to find out the influence of the topic on the ratio of the African America Vernacular English to Gam variants, the research dissever the dataset into five different topics. The five categories in which the topics were divided are African Americans references from Bible The United States of America personal thoughts and experience of President Obama and the category accord to the theme of the speech.It is easy to evaluate and analyze the hypothesis when the speech has the same topic of discussion while the audience is different. One can easily point out whether a topic can trigger the use of variants of the two variations in question. It is also the aim of the analysis to connect the overall findings of different to help make it possible the retrieval of the two variants based on the topic and the evaluation of whether certain topics cause the use of high or lower number of variants indexical of African America Ver nacular English. Unfortunately, the evaluation reveals that no topic provoked any significant use of variants indexical of African America Vernacular English. Just like the previous retrieval of the (HAPPY) vowels in orthographic revealed a higher(prenominal) number of African America Vernacular English variants, analyzing (HAPPY) vowels for the topics also revealed higher number of African America Vernacular English variants. This analysis did not image any significant results.In the end, it can be said that for the present research the topics were divided very broadly. However in future, detailed division of the topics can produce better results. However the hypothesis of the use of higher frequence of African America Vernacular English variants can be impacted by the topic of the speech will not be pursued further. In the following section, the author will present the number of the analysis and the ratios provided for the results.DiscussionThis section presents the yields on th e evaluation of the four speeches of President Obama. The analysis done will be to answer the question whether Obama shift style based on the audience and whether Obama uses the African America Vernacular English style in front of the Black audience or not. In the discussion, we will try to connect the internal finding of the speeches with the external context. It is said that the speech is greatly influenced by the hearty context of the speaker or the speech. Therefore for the evaluation the audience of the speech in taken into consideration and President Obamas personal background can also help in providing insight into whether Obama uses African America Vernacular English variants when delivering speech in front of the African Americans. (Bell, p.141)If one tries to evaluated President Obamas speech against the list of unique phonological African America Vernacular English characteristic, one can find out that the above analysis will not be able to provide proof to term Obamas s peech style an African American Vernacular English. By using a list of phonological African America Vernacular English characteristic to measure Obamas speech will ignore the fact that style wrench is a process of bricolage. (Eckert, p.4) The idea is to construct and give a unique and distinct identity of an individual through the speech while at the same time the speech should also be able to relate to the audience. One can understand Obamas speech style and style shift, if one understands that style is formed by clustering linguistics with a social meaning. Therefore in Obamas speech, the author has detected multiple linguistic variants which can be associated with African America Vernacular English. (Bell, 141)However it can also be said that the analysis noticed that the variants can also be associated with the Southern washrag vascular English (SWVE). However it should be not that style can be defined as the way an individual speaker speaks in congenator to the audience. The refore one can safely assume that it would be irrelevant and meaningless for President Obama to apply style shift toward Southern gabardine vascular English in the context of the four speeches. As mentioned before, style of the speech has the potential to portray many social meaning using it indexical field. It would be inaccurate to consider President Obama use Southern White vascular English in the context of four speeches having a dominant black audience as it should be clear to the President Obama that the audience does not share the social meanings presented by the Southern White vascular English variants. In unforesightful it can be said that the linguistic characteristic of African America Vernacular English are different from indexical fields of Southern White vascular English. Therefore there is no reason to believe that President Obama employed deliberately the use of Southern White vascular English variants in the four speeches.Now, we shall discuss the combination of t he (HAPPY) variable and (ING) variable noticed in the speeches in the social context. The audience of the four Obama speeches was mostly back therefore one can place the variants in the indexical cluster of African America Vernacular English rather than AWVE. When the three speeches in front of the black audience were evaluated, the in variants in gerunds showed similar ratios i.e. 22%, 30.5% and 38.5%. However, the speech delivered by President Obama in front of the mixed audience did not show any in variant. There was a significant use of the (ING) variable followed by an alveolar stop (t and d) in the three speeches delivered in front of the black audience i.e. 38.5%, 26.3% and 75%. Again the speech delivered in front of the mixed audience shows interestingly result. There were nine moments through the speech where in variant could have been used however the (ING) variants is used instead and has a 100% occurrence. The finding proves that President Obama is aware not to speak in a non-ethically marked speech in the mixed audience. On the other hand, the reason for the absence of the in variant can be due to a more formal setting. The speech was given as a response to the pressure of President Obama and his candidacy. In such situation, the President has to make a very clear and precise statement as not to draw any controversial messages out of the speech.Furthermore, the research has also shown the continuous lowering of the (HAPPY) vowel in the four speeches. Kings Church speech (19.7%) and Hampton University Speech (29.1%) show high frequency in low usage of the (HAPPY) vowel while the Perfect Union (17.9%) and CBC speech (4.2%) show low frequency. After noticing the occurrence of the lowered (HAPPY vowel), one has to look for the syntactic context of the orthographic y words. The ratio has the same pattern for the four speeches as for the (HAPPY) vowel. The percentage of the ratio for Hampton University and Kings Church speech was 55.1% and 60.4% respect ively while ratio for CBC and Perfect Union Speech was 26.8%.Analysis was also on orthographic y words followed by a consonant which showed a relative distribution. The Kings Church speech and Hampton University Speech show high percentage distribution the y words followed by consonant i.e. 40% and 45.6% respectively while the Perfect Union speech show 8.1% of distribution. Interestingly, the CBC speech did not show any lowering of the (HAPPY) vowel under the circumstance. The overall result of the analysis of the (HAPPY) vowel shows that kings church speech and Hampton University speech had higher number of black audience which could be related to the lowering of the (HAPPY) vowel. President Obama lowers the (HAPPY) vowel in his speech in the black audience. but the pattern is also detected in the speech of President Obama in front of the non-black audience. Therefore one can deduce that this shift style in the President speech can be denote to his natural style of speaking.In sho rt, the paper would point out that the small dataset and two variables used in the research cannot be able to deduce the style shift in the President Obama speech properly. One cannot prove that Obama uses style shift toward African America Vernacular English deliberately or unintentionally. However, the small dataset that was used in the research shows relevance towards the use of African America Vernacular English which can be used to assume that it is Obamas natural way of speaking. One is also able to deduce the President Obama style shift will not be a basilectal style. But one can enunciate that President Obama speech style can be taken as the most reputable standard for African America Vernacular English. But one has to evaluate more speeches in the future to come to a more substantial conclusion.However, the speeches have shown different ratios of the variants indexical of African America Vernacular English and Gam. The Kings Church speech and the Hampton University Speech was delivered in front of the black audience show a high percentage of the African America Vernacular English variants while the Perfect Union speech was delivered in front a mixed audience showed lower percentage as compared to the other two speeches. But the research also detected African America Vernacular English variants in the Perfect Union speech. However the results of the CBC speech were striking and different. Therefore one is safe to say that the research did detect a difference in the speeches in front of the black and mixed audience which points out that President Obama deliberately use specific variants in the speech.ConclusionThere are multiple feature and characteristics that impact the way an individual speak. In short, each individual has their own style of speaking. Furthermore, during conversations many individual deliberately and unintentionally style shift in their speech depending on the audience. In United States, the style shift of President Obama is under g reat debate. One can safely say that the President knows the talent of comfortably shift style during his speeches. His speech style depends greatly on the topic of the speech, audience, and his own speaking style. In the research, the author evaluated four speeches of President Obama to find out whether he style shift during the speech in front of the black audience or not. The research was able to externalize based on four speeches that President Obama does use the African America Vernacular English variant deliberately in front of the black audience. However there was also high percentage of African America Vernacular English variants use in front of the non-black audience which can denote to the fact that President Black himself in black. Therefore the African America Vernacular English variant is part of his speaking style.BibliographyBell, A. (1984). Style as Audience Design.Detert, A. C., Rasmussen, D. S., Kristensen, K. R. (2013). Barack Obama and the blk kmjunt-A study of style-shifting. Diss.Eckert, P. (1996). Vowels and Nail Polish The Emergence of Linguistic Style in the Preadolescent and Heterosexual Marketplace.Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the Indexical Field. journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4) , 453-476.Fisk, J. (1982). Introduction to Communication Studies. London Routledge.