Persuasive Strategies In English Political Speeches From The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Politics is a process of seeking group decisions by the distribution of power and resources in order to put certain political, economic and social ideas into practice (Bayram, 2010). It is hardly imagined that almost every political action is prepared, accompanied, influenced and accomplished without the utilization of persuasive strategies. The study on Persuasive Strategies in English Political Speeches from the Perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis attempts to build up a comprehensive picture of persuasive strategies in political discourse, especially contrasting political stands of the two presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during their 2016 Presidential campaign. Methodologically, the study was designed as a descriptive comparative study using qualitative method since the collected data was targeted to yield information about the syntactic linguistic units in the form of sentences, phrases, clauses and words. These were classified into their syntactic categories along with their semantic functions, adopting Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) model (1995, 2010), Halliday’s Textual Analysis in Systemic Functional Grammar (2004, 2014) as the grounding theories, assisted by rhetoric theory by Aristotle (4th c.B.C) to unearth the persuasive strategies employed by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in their presidential election speeches. Accordingly, thanks to the contrastive analysis of the persuasive strategies and the metafunctions utilized by the two politicians in 35 speeches, the dissertation discovered that both politicians presented their different political stands and ideologies over various issues. Although Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump deeply reflected their tremendous love, patriotism and loyalty for their nation through their presidential election speeches, they mostly showed their disagreement on quite a large number of aspects manifested in seven conflicting ideologies. The current situation of the American society was, therefore, also concurrently portrayed through the dissertation’s findings. The dissertation, as briefly described above, is hoped to entail significant contribution to research on both language and discourse concerning persuasive strategies.