Clinton's Inauguration

“Today we celebrate the mystery of American renewal.”

With this opening Clinton introduces his focal point. He supports this with the metaphor of spring and the acknowledgement of present day winter. Spring is a recurring image throughout his speech, capable of evoking the idea of renewal and reinvention in a very visual way. From the get go, he actively and consistently works to diminish the distinctions present between his audience, the American people, and himself, as in, “my fellow Americans”. His most blatant and effective rhetorical style is alliteration.

“Deep divisions”

“Sights and sounds of this ceremony…instantaneously”

“end to the era of deadlock and drift”

“resolve to reform”

“Profound & powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world”

This engages the audiences through the aesthetic or poetic elements of his speech. It also actively emphasizes and connects certain ideas together. The structure of his speech is engendered through varying layers of parallelism. One common and simple form of this is homoioptoton, in which he creates patterns of similar word endings, as in:

“Communications and commerce are global, investment is mobile, technology is almost magical, ambition for a better life is now universal.”

This last sentence builds up. Indirectly utilizing the hypotactic structure he implies that the last clause is the result of the first three clauses. Yet it is technically paratactic since it does not directly spell anything out to us it only implicitly reveals a connection.

His writing is accessible while remaining eloquent. His tone sounds sincere and relatable. He articulates every syllable, speaking slowly and clearly. He alters his volume and emphasizes certain words, to create suspense and climax. He seems to end many sentences softly, noticeably arriving at a resolution after a passionate climax. His speech is in the periodic style, thought out and with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. His reflections upon America’s past also ascribe his speech to the periodic style.

At one point he defines posterity in a specific way. He exploits the audience’s preconceived connotations of the word, rendering it a tool capable of uniting our definition with his and further with several secondary concepts.

He concludes, as he began, with the concept of renewal, leaving the audience feeling a sense of finality.

As far as questions regarding Lanham, I am having a hard time discerning noun vs. verb style sentences, even though this should probably be the easiest of his styles to understand.