Rhetorical Analysis Of George W. Bush's Speech

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“A Great People has been moved to defend a Great Nation” On September 11th, 2001 terrorists associated with Al Qaeda and led by Osama Bin Laden attacked the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon building in Washington D.C. Later the same day at 8:30 in the evening, President George W. Bush addressed the nation. The speech lasted five minutes and addressed a defining moment in history as well as in President Bush’s administration. The address was President Bush’s reaction to the terrorist attacks on the nation and it would dictate how the American citizens would live through the tragedy. The attacks would ultimately lead to changes in American foreign policy, America’s involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, and much controversy about appropriate action to combat terrorism at home and abroad. In the address, President Bush reassured the people the government…show more content…
The syntactic level of language is the foregrounding of information through word order, and the significance can go unnoticed by the audience because the meaning is creatively woven in. Then there is the lexical level of language where the significance is more clearly stated and the meaning is rarely fully unnoticed by the audience. Both of these levels of language can be used in political discourse and be effective. We see the lexical level of language more than the syntactic because of the clarity the situation was calling for. The quality of these operations as well as the frequency a speaker uses them influences the audience’s perceptions and can lead to shared views. Lexical language… “specifies the relation between a head word, its arguments, and the meaning that results when they are combined. Rules of syntactic mapping specify the way the arguments are realized (or suppressed) in the syntactic environment of the word.” (Müller & Wechsler 5) This article clearly defines the lexical level of language and highlights its differences among other
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