Richard Lanham & Bill Clinton's Inaugural Speech

-How does Clinton use various sentence types?

-What persuasion techniques does he use?

-Comment on the effectiveness of repetition; vocabulary/word choice.

Based on the prose analysis theories of Richard Lanham, Bill Clinton’s inaugural speech demonstrates the grammatical sentence structures parataxis, hypotaxis, and asyndeton. He uses each manner of coordinating phrases throughout, however often focusing on one for a certain number of paragraphs.

An example of Clinton’s use of parataxis can be found in paragraph #14, “But when most people are working harder for less; when others cannot work at all; when the cost of health care devastates families and threatens to bankrupt many of our enterprises, great and small; when fear of crime robs law-abiding citizens of their freedom; and when millions of poor children cannot even imagine the lives we are calling them to lead—we have not made change our friend.” These prose often exhibit similar colloquial tendencies of spoken language or “train of thought”. The short clauses create a steady rhythm that escalates from the beginning of the speech to the end (but not from sentence to sentence). Each point is delivered with the intent to remind, motivate, or promise.

Clinton uses repetition as a means of psychological persuasion, and demonstrates this method in various ways. While it can be demonstrated in the parataxis construction of sentences, another example of repetition is through the asyndetic coordination of clauses. Towards the end of his speech, Clinton uses asyndetic phrases one after another; a choice which reflects the manner of listing conjunctions in a series that the style follows. “Our hopes, our hearts, our hands, are with those on every continent who are building democracy and freedom,” (36); “And you have changed the face of Congress, the presidency and the political process itself,” (37), “But no president, no Congress, no government, can undertake this mission alone,” (38).

The third type of sentence coordination is called hypotaxis. Hypotaxis demonstrates a pairing of clause with “unequal” constructs by manipulating the order of a sentence so that the explanatory prose comes before of the action. This type of structure forces the audience to wait until the end of the sentence for a sense of resolution. “...But, by the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we spring forth,” (2) and “To renew America, we must be bold,” (21) are both examples of hypotaxis.