Obama Inaugural Address - 2009 (Written Transcript)

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1872715,00.html

On the 20th of January, 2009, citizens gathered at the capitol building for the inaugural ceremony where Barack Obama addressed them all. The purpose of this piece is to inform the people of America that their nation has the power to expand and become greater. The function of this oiece is informative as well as persuasive. It is of a consultative register as Obama attempts to persuade his nation. 

The lexical choice in Barrack Obama's inaugural address contributes to the level of formality through the persuasion of the American public and the careful planning used to back up his purpose with evidence; "These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics". This means that Obama is speaking the truth about what his intentions are and supporting them with statistical evidence. Repetition is also present around words such as "on this day", "generation", "all", "god bless" and "we". This contributes to the level of formality through emphasising the purpose about why he should be president. 

The syntactic structure of this piece contributes to the persuasion of the audience. Obama tends to use a lot of simple sentences to not bore the audience with a complex unnecessary utterance. He also uses many declarative sentence types; for example when making a statement about George Bush, "I thank George Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout his transition. 

The discourse of this piece uses both cohesion and coherence to help the flow and structure. Obama beings the flow with history, present and future of America, following with the history of the nation and moving on to the present that America is facing extreme crisis; "Our economy is badly weakened". This causes the audience to realise how major the crisis of the American economy has become. The following paragraphs discuss the future through statistical data; "Today I say to you the challenges we face are real". The coherence in this piece is identified through implicature where language is indirect and what is meant is not exactly what is read; for example "We remain a young nation, but in the words of scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things". This achieves formality through the reader once inferring what is meant, realises the importance and is persuaded. 

Making use of lexical choice, syntactic structure and the flow of discourse, cohesion and coherence, a formal piece is created to inform and persuade the nation of America of the importance of the economic crisis that is being faced.