Speech Acts Sequences in Bush's and Osama’s first Inaugural Speeches

This study presents the extension of a theory proposed by Searle. Its aim is to show that the illocutionary forces of speech acts within one sequence affect each other. Two speeches are chosen from the American culture. The first one is that of Bush while the second is delivered by Obama. The policy of these two presidents is very different. This difference provides good environment to analyze the sample contrastively in order to show which speech act occupies the first rank in the two speeches depending on the relationships presented by Ferrara (1980) which are: Justification, amplification and a relation of contrastive apposition.