Comparison and conclusion

The theoretical part of this thesis brought together some theoretical concepts and theories that are helpful in order to understand better all aspects of discourse analysis. The first part of the practical part then tried to introduce and describe all speeches from the corpus. These descriptions was afterwards followed by comparison of the prevalence of topics, reference or inference and the using or omitting of the entailment. This conclusion therefore summarize these final findings.

The most prevailing feature inn all of the analyzed speeches was a remarkable occurrence of entailment. In all speeches, it appears in more than a half of their paragraphs. Concretely, its occurrence oscillates among 86.67 per cent to 51.65 per cent paragraphs in domestic speeches and among 76.47 per cent to 56.52 per cent of paragraphs in foreign speeches. Entailment could be particularly characterized as a more typical feature of domestic speeches; yet there are significant differences as, for instance, Obama's victory and inaugural speeches are quite extraordinary in this sense and resemble a bit to an oath. Therefore, the use of entailment might be influenced also by other factors, such as the explicitness of the speeches. It might be particularly stated a rule: the more concrete the speech is, the less use of entailment would occur in it and vice versa. Table 31 bring together complete summary.

Table 31: Entailment in all Speeches

The speeches are a bit more distinctive in the case of their explicitness. Domestic speeches are explicit from 25.81 per cent of paragraphs in inaugural speech to 64.84 per cent of paragraphs in Obama's address to the US Congress in 2009. In other words, factualness is prevailing feature in all speeches except inaugural speech, which is again a bit extraordinary. Also foreign speeches vary significantly, as the most factual speech in Canada reaches 86.96 per cent of paragraphs with reference and the most inexplicit speech in China consists of just 41.67 per cent of paragraphs with reference to concrete events or people; the speech in China is also the only from foreign ones where inference prevails over reference. Therefore, it might be suggested that although the majority of all speeches was predominantly concrete, the explicitness of speeches depends more on particular situation than on the fact whether it is domestic or foreign speech. Table 32 brings together a summary.

Table 32: Explicitness in all Speeches

In the category of prevailing theme, it seems that the most preferred is speaking about the present situation. Obama talks about it among 30 to 48.35 per cent of paragraphs in domestic speeches and among 31.88 to 62.50 per cent paragraphs in foreign speeches. It is quite surprising that the most significant difference in domestic speeches is among Obama`s victory and inaugural speeches, i.e. speeches that might be expected to be quite similar. The explanation is, however, quite simple: As it has been already pointed out the significant space in Obama`s victory speech is dedicated to the story of Ann Nixon Cooper which also influenced the amount of paragraphs dealing with the past events and explicitness of the speech as well.

In the rubric of promises, differences between domestic and foreign speeches were not so significant. Promises occur among 9.68 to 31.87 per cent in domestic speeches and among 8.33 to 32.56 per cent in foreign ones. It is thus evident that the results are more or less similar. Major differences might be traced in the rubric of proposals, where their occurrence in domestic speeches oscillates among 9.90 to 25 per cent, while in foreign ones it oscillates among 16.68 to 41.67 per cent. Foreign speeches are thus aimed to more proposals than domestic ones. A complete summary is put together in table 33.

Table 33: Themes in all Speeches

As the results have shown The main device of persuasion is entailment because it prevails in all of the speeches. And although there are some differences between speeches it seems that these differences are influenced predominantly by particular occasion or event than purely by the fact whether the speech is domestic or foreign one. The analysis thus approved the hypothesis which was stated at the beginning of the practical part of this thesis.