Linguistic analysis of oral edited discourse

Abstract

This essay suggests that the discourse unit, exemplified by manuscript speech, may be viewed as a superordinate linguistic structure composed of sentence units. Extensive syntactic analysis of the Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States leads the writer to postulate: (1) that the logical outline provides the basis for identifying where and why stylistic features appear, (2) that any linguistic unit may function stylistically, and (3) that grammatical patterns extend beyond individual sentences and the logical outline frequently continues below the level of the sentence.