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1 Introduction

Language is an effective way to exchange information and emotion in people’sdaily life. The speaking skill has played a more and more important role in people’spublic speaking. As one kind of public speech, inspirational speech on campus has itsown expression features.

1.1 Research background
Public speaking focuses on utterance expression, and its speaking skills andexpressive modes have attracted much attention. Inspirational speech on campus, as asort of public speaking, delivers expectations and blessings to the graduates with itsunique speaking style. It is an important part in the colorful campus life, especially inAmerican campus life. Inspirational speeches on campus make a profound influenceon graduates’ view towards life and career in USA, causing motivational andinspirational effects constantly.The key of inspirational speech lies in encouraging the graduates to rebuild theirfaith and giving them courage to handle various difficulties on their way to success. Asuccessful inspirational speech not only demands positive words and contents, butalso requires the speaker to achieve emotional resonance with audiences throughadjusting his prosodic expression of emotional speech. The emotion expression is avital aspect in verbal communication. There are many ways to express the speaker’semotion during public speech, such as facial expression, body language and prosodicexpression, etc. Prosody carries information about a speaker’s intentions.Undoubtedly, prosodic expression is one of the most effective methods to attractaudiences’ attention.Prosodic expression includes the application of accent, speech rate, pause andother prosodic features, among which accent takes an important position in expressingemotion. Therefore, it is valuable to investigate the emotion expression and accentperformance in inspirational speech on campus.
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1.2 Research purpose and significance
As a kind of public speech, inspirational speech on campus is an effectivemotivation way to the graduates in America. Intonation constitutes a decisive prosodicelement in arousing sensations in the listeners. The speaker can make tiny changesabout his or her features of intonation to express certain emotions and then raiseaudience’s emotional resonance.For the purpose of the research, the present study will focus on the emotionexpression and accent performance in inspirational speeches on campus from thepragmatic perspective with the help of the software Praat. By adopting auditoryrecognition method and software Praat to find out these accented words, the functionof accented words that is to highlight the expression intention in different kinds ofemotional speech will be analyzed systematically. Thus the distribution of accentedwords in each emotion type will be summarized roughly based on the above analysis.This paper is of both theoretical and practical significance. For one thing,theoretically, the present thesis studies inspirational speech from the perspective ofemotion expression and its prosodic features. The previous studies about inspirationalspeech mainly concern the following aspects: stylistic features, pragmatic features,syntactic features, lexical features as well as the comparison between Chinese andEnglish inspirational speech. Few studies involve prosodic analysis about emotionexpression in inspirational speech. However, the primary medium for all languages issound. Pr