COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PERSUASIVE STRATEGIES IN SELECTED AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL SPEECHES

Author (s) : M. Tharani, M.Swarnadevi, A.Anitha, P.Vasantha

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Abstract :
A political discourse contains some features that must be constant to be understood by the audience, 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 their 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. The findings indicated a single utterance might carry multiple speech acts at the same time. Some speech acts might be employed to provide a background for occurrence of other speech acts. It also showed that the use of agencies and pronouns can be strategic. The comparison of Obama’s speeches with Bush’s speeches revealed that Obama’s discourses tend to be more inclusive.

Keywords : political, American presidential speeches.

Conference Date : 13/11/2020

Pages : 151

Paper ID : 20151