Abstract

Inaugural speeches are precisely the first speeches presented by people occupying leadership positions. Such speeches often serve as major means of appealing to people after a major selection, election, or appointment is announced or confirmed, as is the case of the inaugural speeches of Vice-Chancellors and presidents the world over. The presentation of inaugural speeches serves as a diplomatic means of selling new leadership ideas to people. It can also be referred to as Acceptance Speech. Although there are various studies investigating many linguistic attributes in inaugural addresses, there are quite few studies examining them in part of genre analysis and some linguistic features. Additionally, there are not any specific and standard move structures that can be used in order to universally create an inaugural address, since, even all speeches begin with greeting and finish with thanking audience, the body of those speeches is written differently. This study investigated the Rhetorical structure in inaugural speeches in the academic discourse context. Specifically, the study sought to find out the rhetorical moves in the VC’s inaugural speeches and linguistic strategies employed. The study adopted the New Rhetorical Approach to Genre Analysis. A total of ten (10) speeches collected from the institutional websites and those published online were collected and analysed. The findings indicate that the rhetorical moves varied slightly across the speeches however, the common moves included Salutation, Pronouncement of Acceptance, Articulating sentiments on the occasion, Making pledges, Announcing institutional vision, mission and values to drive the new leadership, Addressing the expectations, Appealing for support, Resorting to religious power. In terms of the linguistic strategies, the use of personal deixis, especially the plural we, us and ours to create a sense of unity, lexical and syntactic parallelism, lexical chain, citing of other orators are among the commonly used strategies. Each of these strategies is pragmatically used. The inaugural speeches of vice chancellors of universities remain a topmost important discourse in every academic community due to the fact that, like the inaugural addresses of presidents, these speeches present the entirety of the visions of every newly appointed vice chancellor.