Obama’s inaugural addresses from the perspective of corpus linguistics

Abstract

A presidential inaugural speech marks, formally, the beginning of a president’s term of office in many countries. In such a speech, the head of state establishes his/her intentions as a leader. Presidents-to-be may also include social, economic and political remarks. This paper aims at analyzing the vocabulary in Barack Obama’s two inaugural speeches in order to detect the major issues at these two historical moments for the American society. A corpus of 4051 words was compiled and consists of Obama’s complete inaugural speeches. AntConc software was used to quantify the words most frequently chosen as well as the number of times each word appeared. It was noticed different lexical choices in both speeches when comparing the two frequency lists generated from them. The paper concludes that the content of the two speeches were influenced by different historical moments.