Discursive ideologies in campaign speeches of Cyril Ramaphosa and Julius Malema in the 2019 South African presidential election (original) (raw)
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To win political power, political actors sometimes adopt linguistic and rhetorical strategies that enable them to communicate effectively with their audience. This makes the study of the language of politics an interesting academic exercise. This study, therefore, attempted a critical discourse analysis of selected speeches of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah to investigate the role of language in creating ideology and sustaining power as well as ideological discursive structures in political speeches. The study specifically investigated linguistic expressions which carry these ideological colourations in the speeches under review. The study employed the qualitative research approach and textual analysis as the design. The purposive sampling method was used to select five speeches of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, and the analysis was done thematically. The study employed the theoretical frameworks of Fairclough’s CDA and Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to analyse the speeches. The study revealed that the...
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This paper uses critical discourse analysis to unpackthe posters used in the 2019 gubernatorial electioneering campaigns in Imo State with a view to discovering the ideologies used to control the minds of the electorate towards giving the candidates a favourable support. Using purposive sampling technique, data were collected from the political posters of three gubernatorial candidates' posters in the election. Van Dijk's Ideological Square is the theoretical framework that drives the study.Theanalysis reveals that some words, expressions and images which have ideological colouration are used by politicians in these posters to demonstrate political will and commitment so as to garner support for their political ambition. Significantly, this paper provides critical insights to the peculiar choices of words in political campaigns and affirms that lexical items and images are not just linguistic elements, but most importantly, ideological tools.
European Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics Studies
This paper is a critical discourse analysis of the 2018 (SONA)- State of the Nation Address delivered by Ghana’s president, Nana Akuffo-Addo. Using van Dijk’s (2004) ideological strategies, the study investigates how the president tries to justify his government’s ideas and persuades his audience by utilizing subtle ideological discourse structures in his speech. The text used in the study is the whole of the 2018 state of the nation address obtained from www.my joy online.org. The study employs content analysis for analysing the data. The major ideological strategies employed have been positive self-representation and in-group favouritism supported by minor ideological strategies while projecting past opponent governments negatively. Article visualizations:
The Language of Politics: A CDA of the 2013 Kenyan Presidential Campaign Discourse
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This paper applies critical and descriptive methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze and unpack linguistic persuasive strategies, concealed meanings and ideologies in the presidential campaign discourses in Kenya leading to the April 4, 2013 elections. The author used both primary data (speeches, party manifestos and campaign video clips) as well as secondary data (newspapers and online sources) to critically analyze the rhetorical devices and strategies used by the main contenders for the presidency-Uhuru Kenyatta of the Jubilee Coalition and Raila Odinga of the Coalition for Reform and Democracy (CORD). The author argues, and demonstrates, that language is a powerful tool that politicians seeking political power use to not only communicate their policies and ideological positions, but also to create certain perceptions in order to influence and manipulate the voters with a view to gaining an advantage over their opponents.
The use of language by the African National Congress in its 1999-2009 national election manifestos
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There is more to language than just its formal structural properties and, similarly, more to language function than just its communicative and naming function. Language does not exist independent of society. As a part of society, it is used in a diversity of functions: it influences thought processes, constitutes what people perceive as reality, and produces, reproduces and denies prejudices. It is in pursuit of its ideological function that language plays a significant role in the establishment and maintenance of systematically asymmetrical power relations. This study focuses on the role that language plays in efforts to position the African National Congress (ANC) as more fit to govern than other political parties in South Africa. Adopting a qualitative research strategy, the study provides an analysis of the discourse that is constructed in the ANC's 1999, 2004 and 2009 national election manifestos. The analysis is presented within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and is performed in terms of linguistic devices, techniques and strategies such as genre and its sequential structure, pronouns, contrasting expressions, intertextuality, grounding and elision, statistics and numerical figures, and discourse. It is demonstrated that the three election manifestos are situated within a specific socioeconomic and political context defined by poverty, unemployment and inequality, which are rooted in the South African history of colonialism and race-based capitalism. The texts draw from resources of the genre of manifesto and show common structural features. It is shown that ambiguous pronouns are used to build up affinities between the ANC and the reader/listener with respect to the achievements of the ANC-led government, what work still needs to be done, and to position the ANC's vision as one that is generally shared by the people. Contrasting expressions are used to disparage the apartheid system and to extol the post-1994 democratic system. In all three texts the ANC is foregrounded as the organization which not only brought freedom to South Africa, but which in fact led the struggle for freedom and change. At the same time, there is an omission of other political organizations and the role they played in this struggle. It is also demonstrated that the three texts constituted by elements of other texts such as the Freedom Charter (1955), the Reconstruction and Development Programme (1994) and the Constitution (1996) use statistics and figures to bestow the ANC with a systematic and scientific gravitas. Lastly, the three manifestos reflect a discourse of "complete" or "total" freedom, which is inclusive of the social, economic and political aspects of the reality of South Africans' lives. It is argued that these linguistic devices, techniques and strategies are used in the 1999, 2004 and 2009 national election manifestos to position the ANC as more fit to govern South Africa than other political parties. Stellenbosch University http://scholar.sun.ac.za ACDP African Christian Democratic Party AIDS Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome ANC African National Congress APRM African Peer Review Mechanism CDA Critical Discourse Analysis Cope Congress of the People COSATU Congress of South African Trade Unions DA Democratic Alliance DP Democratic Party EISA Electoral Institute for the Sustainability of Democracy in South Africa Assembly. This is in contrast to the 20,4 per cent of the poll obtained by the NP, with 3,983,690 votes collected and 82 seats gained in the National Assembly (Meredith 1994:184-185; Reynolds 1994:183). In the June 1999 elections the ANC won a sweeping victory. It received 66,4 per cent of the vote, taking 10,601,330 of the total of 15,977,142 valid votes and thus gaining 266 seats in the National Assembly. In contrast, the DP and the NNP received only 9.6 per cent and 6,9 per cent, respectively, which translated into 1,527,337 votes collected and 38 seats in the National Assembly for the DP and 1,098,215 votes collected and 28 seats in the National Assembly for the NNP (Lodge 1999b:167; Reynolds 1999:175). 1.4 Research question, aim and objectives The investigation conducted in this study focuses on the following general question: How does the ANC use language in its 1999, 2004 and 2009 national election manifestos to position itself as more fit to govern than other political parties in South Africa? 5 Gudykunst (2003:163) views intercultural communication as one "type" of inter-group communication: communication between members of different social groups. Other types of inter-group communication include communication between able-bodied and disabled, intergenerational communication, communication between members of different social classes and interracial/interethnic communication. The current study, which focuses on power relations between the ANC and other political groupings in South Africa, can be located within the general category of inter-group communication. Stellenbosch University http://scholar.sun.ac.za CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Language is a very important medium for the expression of relations of power, [although] it is not the only medium.
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This article investigates how political candidates in the Eastern Cape Province in South Africa employed means of strategic manoeuvring during the provincial election campaigns of 2019. It assumes the framework of the extended pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation, by first reconstructing the argumentation structure, identifying the means of strategic manoeuvring, and finally, critically analysing the prototypical speech acts in the political campaign discourse. The data were collected from the isiXhosa newspaper I’solezwe LesiXhosa during the campaign from February to April 2019. The findings demonstrate commissives and assertives as the prototypical speech acts in the political argumentative discourse in the Eastern Cape Province. In addition, dissociation is manifested in multiple contexts to persuade the audience of the standpoint that the opposition parties are more visionary than the incumbent party, African National Congress.
African journal of inter-multidisciplinary studies, 2023
This study analyses electioneering discourses in selected social media sites of Phuthaditjhaba in South Africa. It focuses on political messages and images posted by political parties on selected Facebook Pages and X handles in Phuthaditjhaba. Using critical discourse analysis as a method and netnography as an instrument to collect data from selected sites, I analyse the packaging and language of political communication and highlighting socioeconomic issues used by political parties to persuade voters and undermine messages of their competitors. The theoretical underpinnings of the study are drawn from Kubin and von Sikorski's (2021) notions of ideological and affective polarisation, and Entman's (1995) idea of social media constructions of poverty. Their ideas guide my analysis of how political rivals capitalise on existing socioeconomic issues in Phuthaditjhaba to mobilise sentiment among disgruntled residents. Data was collected from ten social media sites namely, four Facebook group pages, four X group handles and two individual X handles. Ten images and accompanying texts were sampled from the selected sites. Thematic analysis was used to categorise the data. The findings of the study show that while politicians used social media for campaign purposes, residents of Phuthaditjhaba used it to contest, and challenge messages of political parties.
A Rhetorical Analysis of the Presidential Election Campaign Discourse in Zambia
The International Journal of Humanities & Social Studies, 2020
Language is considered as a purely human and non-instinctive method of expressing feelings and yearnings by way of a system of freely produced symbols (Sapir, 1939). The noticeable role of language in the life of every human being and the society as a whole cannot be underestimated or over emphasised. This is because language is used as a medium of serenity, persuasion and advancement on one hand and a medium of uproar, disorder and retrogression on another hand. The present study focuses on a significant form of political discourse, the election campaigns. The term politics is from Greek: πολιτικός politikos, which denotes "of, for, or relating to citizens," in the course of making decisions pertaining to all members of each group (James, 2014). In a narrow way, the concept designates to accomplishing and exercising positions of governance, that is, organised control over a human community, especially a state. Furthermore, politics is the practice of the dispersion of power and resources within a given community as well as the interrelationship(s) between communities (James, 2014). Essentially, the study analyses political discourse. Johnson and Johnson (2000) explain political discourse analysis as the arena of discourse analysis which centres on discourse in political forums such as debates, speeches, and hearings as the phenomenon of interest. The main objective of the present study is to analyse rhetorical strategies in presidential campaign discourse in Zambia, and the study makes use of SFG as the framework guiding the study. Since the introduction of multi-party politics in Zambia in 1991, several political parties have been competing for political power. In Zambia, general elections are held every five years. These elections are preceded by rigorous political campaigns by different political parties characterised by all sorts of language as politicians solicit for votes. What matters in order to be understood during these campaigns, is not what politicians say, but rather how they present what they say. During the run up to the August 11, 2016 elections, there were nine presidential candidates who were vying for presidency. However, the race was between two leading contenders-Hakainde Hichilema for the United Party for National Development (UPND) and Edgar Lungu for the Patriotic Front (PF). The study focuses on one of the two main contenders
The study takes a stance to explore the political discourse speech in Malawi as the country draws closer to the May 2019 general elections. This is a warlike zone period with different political figures pursuing, negotiating, and struggling for power. We specially mount our research to investigate how Saulos Klaus Chilima strategizes to get the winning card by exploring his voice and voice projection techniques during the launch of his party. We have hence borrowed insights from Heffer's (2013, 2018) Voice Projection framework (VPF) and used Nvivo 11 Pro software in the analysis. The study discovers that his launch speech is highly authorizing, persuading, converging, and highlighting with very few instances of centring, and indexing which made the speech more powerful, stimulating and impressive. The study brings a different dimension of analyzing political discourse by shopping a theory from Forensic discourse.
Discursive strategies in political speech: The words of Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika
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