Vice-Chancellor’s Address as an Oral Genre: Structural, Compositional, Syntactic and Lexico-Semantic Features of the Communicative Event

Abstract

This article presents an integrative linguistic analysis of the annual English-language address of a university vice-chancellor to the academic community. The research was performed within the framework of contemporary discourse theory and views the vice-chancellor’s address as an established traditional oral speech genre. The paper raises the questions of qualifying and balancing the notions of oral communication, text, discourse, and genre; each of these is interpreted in a symbiotic connection with the determining adjective ‘academic’. The structural and compositional features of the vice-chancellor’s address include the subdivision of the speech into four logically arranged parts: pre-text, introduction, main body, and conclusion. The syntactic features manifest themselves as means and devices of information packaging that express the semantic categories of prospection and retrospection. In addition, we can observe cases of intentional use of logical connectives, rhetorical questions, inversion, and variable syntactic parallelism. Special communicative functions are performed by the following lexicosemantic features of the genre under discussion: repetition (reiteration of both words and senses); words and phrases expressing quantity, numerical data included; toponyms; abbreviations; terms of science; quotes; words representing key concepts of the speech; and a separate group of lexical units. The latter, through their semantic features, serve to create and promote a positive image of the institution (its history and prestige, international activities, quality of education, mission, prospects for development, etc.). The preparation and delivery of the vice-chancellor’s address as an oral genre in the English-language academic communication is primarily based on the speaker’s idea of challenges faced by the university and the most effective ways of responding to them.