Analysis on the Cohesive and Coherent Features of John Kennedy’s First Inaugural Address

John Kennedy’s first inaugural address is one of the widely appreciated speeches worldwide. It is famous not only for calling up the American people to well serve the country, but also for its extraordinary linguistic power to arouse the listeners’ emotions, which lies to a great extent in the marvelous employment of the cohesive and coherent devices in the process of its delivery. Cohesion and coherence are two elementary and significant concepts in the theoretical system of discourse analysis. There-fore, they play an important role in the structuring, arrangement, interpretation and analysis of a discourse. In this sense, it is significant to analyze the cohesive and coherent features of John Kennedy’s first inaugural address in order to obtain a penetrating comprehension of the speech in many aspects. A detailed analysis on the cohesive and coherent features of the speech has been conducted in this paper. In the aspect of cohesion in the address, the devices employed fall into two categories: structural cohesion and non-structural cohesion. Structural cohesive devices used in the discourse are mainly grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion like repetition, ellipsis, conjunction, etc. Non-structural methods adopted in the speech are transitivity, mood and modality, thematic progression, parallel structure and so on. In the aspect of coherence, five levels of coherent methods have been employed, namely, lexical level, syntax level, semantic level, phonological level and social semiotic level. The neat intermingling of the cohesive and coherent methods function cooperatively and lead to the smooth going of the text.