A study of cohesive devices in the George Walker Bush's second presidential inaugural speech

This research is intended to analyze the cohesive devices expressed on the George Walker Bush's second presidential inaugural speech in which the devices organize semantic (meaning) relationship between an element and the others. The organization of those elements is categorized as cohesion which is also viewed as one of the elements helping the audience to follow easily the train of thought of the speaker or the writer. George Walker Bush as the president of America reelected in 2005 has also constructed his second speech by many elements of cohesive devices. In line of this, the script of the speech includes spoken text since it covers verbal record of the speech. Thus, it becomes an interesting object to be researched. The problems are covered by the question “What types of cohesive devices are used in the George Walker Bush’s second presidential inaugural speech?” and “What are the functions of cohesive devices used in George Walker Bush’s second presidential inaugural speech?”.

This research uses descriptive qualitative design in which the data are taken from the utterances expressed by George Walker Bush during his presenting second presidential inaugural speech. The data are analyzed by exploring Halliday and Hasan’s theory of cohesive devices.

The research has obtained the following results. On the grammatical cohesive devices which comprise reference, ellipsis, substitution and conjunction, the data show that the most widely used is reference which function is to indicate reference pronoun. Then, in the second position is conjunction which function is to indicate a connection between ideas. After that ellipsis, its function is to simplify the sentences of utterances. And no substitution is found in which it makes the language expressed accurate by substituting specific terms. Nevertheless, on the lexical cohesive devices which cover reiteration and collocation, it is found that the most widely used is reiteration namely repetition followed by metonym, hyponym, and synonym. And no antonym is found within the script. However, collocation is rarely found.

From the results, it is expected that this research is useful for politicians, teachers, students, preachers and any other professions who has intension to produce more qualified and rationale text of speech which can achieve their aim.