A discourse analytic investigation into politicians’ use of rhetorical and persuasive strategies: The case of US election speeches (original) (raw)
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Political language is marked with the feature of persuasiveness and is starkly different from the ordinary language through the application of rhetorical figures. In fact, it differs substantially from ordinary language in terms of using vocabulary, structure and tone of voice which are considered the fundamental tenets of persuasive language. In this respect, the aim of this paper was to find out how Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) plays a vital role in unraveling the hidden ideas by scrutinizing the presence of power in political speeches through undertaking a rigorous scrutiny of the speeches of two of the former presidents of the USA and distinguishing them from daily speeches of common people. To this end, five speeches by John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, two of the former presidents of USA, who have been able to move a large audience to support their campaigns by employing rhetorical language were analysed. The findings revealed that the success of these two presidents lies in their manipulation of different linguistic and literary devices, such as parallelism, euphemism, alliteration and metaphor to set forth their ideas. The results also implied that the presidents' special discourses have enabled them to reinforce values dear to American society such as: unity, the sense of bond, and nationalism in their electoral campaigns and afterwards in their administration.
Alzahra University, 2021
In this research, it was tried to follow the recent Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) approaches that map text over relevant context as supported by Van Dijk (2006). The main intention is to look at political discourse via the lenses of PDA to see whether ideologies and power relations of interlocutors in the target setting of this study could have possibly been aligned with linguistic elements -here rhetorical devices- and to see to what extent such text-context mapping is recognized as relevant to language tools within the selected datasets. Accordingly, the researcher tried to follow a sample of political talk -live 2008 US presidential debates- between two republic vs. democratic campaigns. To do so, some political strategies for argumentation including Van Dijk’s model representing 'Authority', 'Topos or burden', 'Future Representations’, ‘Comparison', 'Consensus', 'Counterfactuals', 'Populism’, 'Generalizations', and 'Number Games' were mapped over some linguistic rhetorical devices such as ‘Metaphor’, ‘Hyperbole’, ‘Irony’, ‘Euphemism’, etc. The common discoursal moves in Obama’s vs. McCain's speech statements were compared and contrasted among similar strategies to find any emergent rhetorical devices. Findings indicate that 1) the political candidates had made use of rhetorical and political moves in tandem within the same propositional units, 2) some of the employed discourse devices were paralleled with the majority of political strategies like Repetition and Metaphor, and 3) some political strategies had been used to excess like 'Comparison’, 'Populism', and 'Future Representation’.
Persuasive Strategies in Trump’s Final Presidential Debate: A Critical Discourse Analysis
Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education
The present research aims to analyze the linguistic tools used by Trump in the third and final presidential debate in order to persuade the audience with his political views and enhance his positon as a presidential nominee. Trump deploys pragmatic and stylistic devices with the purpose of manipulating the minds of the audience. Presupposition and conversational implicature are explored in the course of the analysis, in addition to some rhetorical tools such as metaphor, hyperbole, irony, repetition and syntactic parallelism. Critical Discourse Analysis constitutes the theoretical framework for the analysis and van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach is employed as it emphasizes the relationship between social interaction and discourse. The analysis of these linguistic features prove that Trump always depicts the Americans as victims of the former government, exploits the situation in Iraq, the economic decline and the national insecurity to launch an attack at Clinton's political short-sightedness, and finally avows that a bright future is ahead under his reign.
Strategies of Legitimisation and Delegitimisation in Selected American Presidential Speeches
Respectus Philologicus
Politicians invest a lot of time and effort to win elections and present themselves in the best possible manner. They use language strategies to present and legitimise themselves as the right choice. And if they are the right choice, then their opponent is obviously not, so while they are trying to acclaim themselves and their political party, they use strategies to delegitimise and attack their opponents and the policy they represent. This paper aims to conduct a critical discourse analysis of the speeches of the two main political opponents in the last elections in the USA, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The research gives an insight into the manipulative function of language and covers two aspects: the lexical-semantic and pragmatic aspect and is based on the supposition that the strategies politicians use while talking about themselves and describing their opponents differ. As expected, they use more positive terminology to talk about themselves and their policies, and negative terminology to criticise the opponent's policy. They also employ different pragmatic strategies, such as intensifiers and inclusive pronouns, to involve the audience into the discourse and convince them in their arguments. Finally, although carried out on a relatively small corpus, the analysis gives an insight into the language techniques employed by politicians to legitimise themselves and delegitimise their opponent and thus win the elections.
Art of Persuasion: Political Discourse in Democratic Societies
The ability of skillful and persuasive use of language is a politician’s most powerful weapon. Throughout history, the most successful political leaders have been considered great orators, for they knew how to captivate their audience. This is not always easy to achieve; rhetoric has thus played an important part in public speaking since the beginning of civilization. Many authors have introduced a number of rhetorical devices and have tried to advise orators on how to speak in public. The thesis attempts to illustrate how rhetoric and political language have developed throughout the years, with special attention paid to rhetorical devices used in present day political discourse in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. I present the results of my short discourse analysis that show that both classical and modern rhetorical devices are present in modern political discourse, that British politicians use rhetorical devices more often than American politicians, and that conservatives are more skilled orators than liberals.
Critical Discourse Analysis of Obama's Political Discourse
This paper examines the persuasive strategies of President Obama's public speaking as well as the covert ideology of the same, enshrined in his inaugural address. Our analysis is grounded in Norman Fairclough's assumptions in critical discourse analysis, claiming that "ideologies reside in texts" that "it is not possible to 'read off' ideologies from texts" and that "texts are open to diverse interpretations" .The selected corpus' ideological and persuasive components are assessed, thus revealing Obama's persuasive strategies.
Study of Persuasive Strategies in Selected American Presidential Speeches
International journal of humanities and social sciences, 2016
A political discourse contains some features that must be constant in them to be recognized and understood by the audience as such, but it must, at the same time, fulfill the purpose of persuading the addressees. This work dealt with the persuasive strategies in President Bush’s and President Obama’s selected speeches aiming to uncover persuasive strategies as well as covert Ideologies. Segments of speeches were investigated to verify illocutionary act using Searle’s Speech Act theory. Afterwards, the use of agencies and pronouns were analyzed in light of Fairclough’s (1995) assumption in Critical Discourse Analysis. Furthermore, the use of Aristotle’s persuasion appeals, Ethos, Logos, and Pathos were examined. Lastly, In light of Wodak’s (2001) discursive strategies of (de)legitimization , the presentation of image and otherness was investigated. The findings indicated that multiple speech acts can occur in a single utterance. Some speech acts might be employed in order to provide ...
Academia Letters, 2021
Based on the assumption that the analysis of discourse provides insightful information, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as an interpretative and explanatory research method, "focuses on the ways discourse structures enact, confirm, legitimate, reproduce, or challenge relations of power and dominance in society" (van Dijk, 2001, p.353). From among many discourses, that of politicians has been the focus of CDA practitioners (Blommaert, 2005) since people of politics are more or less dextrous in persuading the community into some cause or position through political persuasive strategies (PPSs), whether advertently or not. The unique code or language of politics is instrumentally useful in persuading and changing people's minds (Janoschka, 2010), and thus people's behaviours or actions. This instrumentality is often manifested in the discourse of campaigns, where, to defeat their political rivals and win larger number of votes, presidential candidates verbalize their ideological positions, socioeconomic policy proposals, their cultural ambitions and so forth, in a way that seem convincing to voters. Politicians use some persuasive strategies in their debates to gain the public attention. In that way, they take advantage of mass persuasion techniques (Hogan, 2012). Accordingly, to achieve their goals, presidential candidates take advantage of some persuasive strategies in the discourse of their presidential campaigns to win the compliance of the public. Such strategies are common among politicians, yet, the degree of convergence or divergence in the quality and quantity of those strategies among different politicians has remained rather untouched. The methods of persuasion whereby the persuasive purpose is carried out vary hugely, ranging from so-called negative campaigning to more positive methods. Whatever the case is, language is a vital part of persuasion process, but not the only one (Beard, 2001). Additionally, in the midst of the development of CDA theories and miscellaneous researches in many countries of the world, political discourse analysis is
Persuasion in Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's Presidential Debates: A Critical Discourse Analysis
2019
The present study aims to provide a critical discourse analysis of the persuasion tactics, power distribution, and the ideological stands in the American presidential debates of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The methodology adopted in this study was based on Fairclough's model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (1995). The thorough analysis of the debates revealed strong dichotomy and contested ideological stands, dissimilar power distribution, and the use of varying persuasive tools of both candidates on all the issues of concern such as immigration, economy, human rights, etc. The author recommends further investigation of the presidential debates across varying cultures based on Fairclough's model of CDA.