An Investigation into Lexical Cohesive Means and Devices to Express the US President Barack Obama's viewpoint of change

Abstract

Based on Halliday and Hasan 's theory of cohesion, this study investigates lexical cohesive means and devices to express the US president Barack Obama's viewpoint of change. The study focuses on analyzing and describing the data which expresses change collected from Obama's twenty speeches of economy, education and foreign policy in term of lexical cohesive means and devices under qualitative and quantitative approaches.The data of this study are only collected from the US official websites which publicize the speeches of Barack Obama and the policies of the US government. After getting the results of lexical cohesive means and devices, we also attempt to describe semantic fields of change which the author's speeches showed in his speeches. Finally, suggestions for further research are made for anyone interested in this issue to go on perfecting this research.Hopefully, the result of the thesis can be somewhat beneficial to the teaching and learning of English as well as vivid and persuasive speeches