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UM E-Theses Collection (澳門大學電子學位論文庫)

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Title

How people tell stories in commencement speeches : the generic structure potential (GSP) of personal narratives

English Abstract

A commencement speech is a genre of public spoken discourse performed at graduation ceremonies. Typically, US universities invite famous celebrities or great figures to give some suggestions or life lessons to the graduates in order to inspire them in this new stage of their careers, and usually the speech takes the form of telling their own personal stories. The purpose of this study is to analyze how commencement speakers construct and tell their stories in graduation ceremonies, exploring the generic structure of personal narratives in commencement speeches. For this, I have chosen ten popular commencement speeches from YouTube, exploring their generic conventions in relation to the four storytelling genres described by Eggins and Slade (1997). After analyzing the ten speeches, I propose a set of potential obligatory and optional stages and their recursive patterns, summarizing our own generic structure potential (GSP), which can be used to predict the discourse organization of future commencement speeches.

Issue date

2015.

Author

Zeng, Fang Lei

Faculty

Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Department

Department of English

Degree

M.A.

Subject

Speeches, addresses, etc.

Discourse analysis, Narrative

Supervisor

Corbett John

Files In This Item

Full-text (Internet)

Location
1/F Zone C
Library URL
991000815539706306