Given and New Information in Barack Obama’s Remarks: A Syntactic Form Analysis

Authors

  • Herdiana Herdiana UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, Indonesia
  • Didin Nuruddin Hidayat UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, Indonesia http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7506-4258
  • Alek Alek UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, Indonesia
  • Nida Husna UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, Indonesia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33394/jollt.v8i4.2827

Keywords:

Discourse Analysis, Information Structure, Speech, Syntactic Form

Abstract

This study seeks to figure out how certain new and given information as information structure of syntactic forms are revealed in Barack Obama’s remarks in Jakarta. The study is focused on the beginning parts of Obama’s remarks, as in that he recalled his childhood memories of staying in Jakarta, Indonesia, for four years. In order to investigate the information structures, we collected the data from digital documents (scripts and videos) of the remark; then, we analyzed the syntactic forms of article “a†(indefinite) and “the†(definite) and also the rheme and theme of the script and the video of the remarks using close textual analysis. The results indicate that the uses of these articles construct certain messages whose tones are either distancing, getting close, or neutralizing the speaker against the audience. Furthermore, the information contained in Obama’s speech reflected the context-awareness of the speaker and also the audience. The speech could also open up further study on (political) critical discourse analysis, as it was delivered in the political contexts between Indonesia and the USA.

Author Biographies

Herdiana Herdiana, UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta

Herdiana is a postgraduate student of English Education, UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta

Didin Nuruddin Hidayat, UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta

Didin is the Head of Department of English Education UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta

Alek Alek, UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta

Alek is a senior lecturer of Department of English Education, UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta

Nida Husna, UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta

Nida is a senior lecturer of Department of English Education, UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta

References

Batluk, L. (2011). Rhythm and Rhetoric: A Linguistic Analysis of Barack Obama Inaugural Address. Retrieved from http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-15601.

Bayram, F. (2010). Ideology and Political Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Erdogan's Political Speech. Annual Review of Education, Communication & Language Sciences, 7.

Capone, A. (2010). Barack Obama's South Carolina speech. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(11), 2964-2977.

Chen, M., & Zechner, K. (2011). Computing and evaluating syntactic complexity features for automated scoring of spontaneous non-native speech. Proceedings of the 49th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (pp. 722-731). Portland: Association for Computational Linguistics.

Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical Discourse Analysis: The critical study of language. Routledge.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. Longman.

Harris, Z. (2018). Language and Information. Retrieved December 18, 2019, from http://zelligharris.org/

Hladký, J. (2003). Language and Function: To the Memory of Jan Firbas. John Benjamins Publishing.

Huberman, M., & Miles, M. B. (2002). The qualitative researcher's companion. Sage.

Kashiwadate, K., Yasuda, T., Fujita, K., Kita, S., & Kobayashi, H. (2020). Syntactic Structure Influences Speech-Gesture Synchronization. Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science, 11(1), 10-14.

Kazemian, B., & Hashemi, S. (2014). Critical discourse analysis of Barack Obama's 2012 speeches: Views from systemic functional linguistics and rhetoric. Theory and Practice in Language Studies (TPLS), 4(6), 1178-1187.

Kövecses, Z. (2010). Metaphor, language, and culture. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 26, 739-757.

Lambrecht, K. (1996). Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents (Vol. 71). Cambridge University Press.

Lin, A. (2013). Critical Discourse Analysis: Overview. The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Morales-López, E. (2019). Discourse Analysis: The Constructivist Perspective and Transdisciplinarity. In Complexity Applications in Language and Communication Sciences (pp. 187-205). Springer, Cham.

Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. Routledge.

Ruark, A., & Fielding-Miller, R. (2016). Using qualitative methods to validate and contextualize quantitative findings: A case study of research on sexual behavior and gender-based violence among young Swazi women. In Global Health Science and Practice (pp. 373–383). https://doi.org/10.9745/GHSP-D-16-00062

Stobbs, G. J. (2012). Critical Discourse Analysis of Barack Obama’s 1st Inaugural Speech. Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.

Szaszák, G., & Beke, A. (2012). Exploiting prosody for automatic syntactic phrase boundary detection in speech. Journal of Language Modelling, 142-172.

Vachek, J. (1966). The Linguistic School of Prague 1966 Edition. Indiana University.

Downloads

Published

2020-10-25

How to Cite

Herdiana, H., Hidayat, D. N., Alek, A., & Husna, N. (2020). Given and New Information in Barack Obama’s Remarks: A Syntactic Form Analysis. Journal of Languages and Language Teaching, 8(4), 458–464. https://doi.org/10.33394/jollt.v8i4.2827

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 4 (2020)

Section

Articles

Citation Check

License

License and Publishing Agreement
In submitting the manuscript to the journal, the authors certify that:

  1. They are authorized by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
  2. The work described has not been formally published before, except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review, thesis, or overlay journal.
  3. That it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere,
  4. That its publication has been approved by all the author(s) and by the responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – of the institutes where the work has been carried out.
  5. They secure the right to reproduce any material that has already been published or copyrighted elsewhere.
  6. They agree to the following license and publishing agreement.

Copyright
Authors who publish with JOLLT Journal of Languages and Language Teaching agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-SA 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. 
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
  3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.

Licensing for Data Publication

JOLLT Journal of Languages and Language Teaching uses a variety of waivers and licenses, that are specifically designed for and appropriate for the treatment of data:
Other data publishing licenses may be allowed as exceptions (subject to approval by the editor on a case-by-case basis) and should be justified with a written statement from the author, which will be published with the article.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.