انطباقِ راهبردهای سیاسی با ابزارهای بلاغی در ‌مناظره‌های پیشا-ریاست جمهوری 2008 ایالات متحده: بررسیِ گفتمان سیاسی

This research aims at examining the types of language style based on sentence structure in the 2020 US presidential candidate debate. The purpose of this research is to find out the types of language style based on sentence structure used by Trump and Biden in the 2020 US presidential candidate debate. The data were analyzed by using Keraf’s theory (2006). The data were the sentences that contained languages style based on sentence structure uttered by Trump and Biden, and the sources of data in this research were the two videos of US presidential candidate debate 2020 and its script. This research used qualitative-descriptive techniques and quantitative calculation because the data will be presented in statistic. The results of the study show that from 12 types of language style based on sentence structure, there were 11 types of language style based on sentence structure used by Trump, meanwhile there were 10 types of language style based on sentence structure used by biden. From a total of 241 data, as many as 105 sentences were uttered by Donald Trump and 146 sentences were uttered by Joe Biden in the two videos of 2020 US presidential candidate debate containing language style based on sentence structure.

Political journalism continues to be the main source of political information in deliberative democracies. However, the advent of hybrid media systems during the last decade(s) has altered how journalists cover politics and how audiences consume relevant content. In this context, live blogging has emerged as a web-based alternative to traditional TV broadcasting. To explore whether and in which forms the trend toward hybrid media systems is empirically traceable in current journalism practice, the present study focuses on political live blogging from four popular media outlets covering the two 2020 US presidential TV debates. It applies a discourse-oriented, mixed-methods, corpus-based approach and specifically considers sourcing practices as well as the normalization of professional role conceptions and practices of objectivity. Results suggest that political live blogging establishes multi-layered and multi-authored discourse that places strong emphasis on accountability and disclosure transparency by updating and linking information, while maintaining the journalistic gatekeeping/gatewatching function. It further emerges that political live blogs are characterized by an informal tone but also by a continuation of traditional news media practices as regards objectivity, as instantiated by the salience of debate topics and political terms and by a clear delineation of information from opinion and contextualization.

The U.S. presidential debates are rich in revealing national/international policies of the politicians. More specifically, the 2012 U.S. presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are unique in balancing and predicting the election outcome through the candidates' discourses. A Political Discourse Analysis is integrated to Ruth Wadak's (2011) Discourse-Historical Approach to investigate how the candidates employ the discursive strategies in order to gain the public support. The present study adopts a qualitative design of analyzing the candidates' speeches. The materials are particular extracts selected from the transcripts of one presidential debate. The purpose of the study is to uncover the discursive strategies in the candidates' speeches when they debate the most important issues of USA. The findings indicate that Obama's continuous use of the referential strategy indicates that there is a heavy emphasis on positive self-representation, defending the previous policy of Obama's government and presenting the record of achievement to gain the voters' support. On the other hand, Romney uses the argumentation strategy to attack Obama's previous policy and trigger the topos of threat that the same faults will take place if Obama is reelected. That is, Romney diminishes the public support surrounding Obama.

The objective of this study is to find out the differences in verbal and non-verbal communication of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in US presidential debate. The study employs qualitative approach to find out the differences in the use of rhetorical strategies by Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. For the analysis of non-verbal communication, the multimodal framework has been applied to find out the differences in non-verbal communication of both candidates. Moreover, the researcher employs Ekman’s theory of FACS and Birdwhistell’s Kinesics to categorize facial expressions and interpret gestures. The sample of this study is the US 2024 Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The data is collected from available televised debate on YouTube channel named as ‘The Wall Street Journal’. The findings show that Kamala uses pathos abundantly. Trump is more likely to use hyperbole. Other rhetorical strategies used by both candidates include ethos, logos, parallelism, repetition and use of adjectives. The analysis of non-verbal communication reveals that Kamala displays expressive facial expressions while Trump is more likely to show serious and less expressive facial expressions. It is concluded from the analysis that Trump uses exaggeration (hyperbole) as rhetorical strategy while kamala makes use of emotional appeal (pathos) as a rhetorical strategy more throughout the debate. Kamala is emotional and feminine; Trump is aggressive and masculine. Their non-verbal communicative patterns display gender differences. The limitation of the study is its small sample of comparing the verbal and non-verbal communication styles of only one male and female politician.

This study examines the strategic use of hedges and boosters in the first US presidential debate of June 26, 2024, between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. These linguistic devices are crucial in shaping political discourse by modulating confidence and authority. Hedges introduce ambiguity and caution, while boosters amplify certainty and assertiveness. Using the official debate transcript as the primary data source, this analysis employs a qualitative content analysis to identify and categorize these strategies. It highlights distinct usage patterns: Joe Biden frequently uses hedges to express caution and acknowledge complexities, while Donald Trump relies heavily on boosters to project unwavering confidence and decisiveness. Biden’s strategic use of hedges allows him to navigate contentious issues with a balanced tone, while Trump’s emphasis on boosters strengthens his assertive stance and enhances his perceived authority. This research fills a gap in existing literature by specifically analyzing these linguistic devices within the context of presidential debates. The findings provide insights into how both candidates use hedges and boosters to influence voter perceptions and address rhetorical challenges, contributing to a deeper understanding of political communication strategies and their effects on audience reception.

This paper analyzes the role of question reformulations in the 2004 US presidential debates. While formulations used for questioning have received quite some attention in the literature, no studies, to my knowledge, with the exception of Clayman (1993), have been concerned with question reformulations, that is, formulations given in response to questions. In contrast to Clayman (1993) who examined the ‘directness/evasiveness’ of a reformulation as a collaborative achievement involving a question-answer-pursuit sequence, this paper analyzes it as a collaborative achievement involving a question-answer-answer sequence (like a panel news interview). The analysis shows that the reformulations in the 2004 US presidential debates involve a device for adjusting the question and the subsequent answer to the candidate’s (actual and presumed) audience. Thus, the relative ‘directness/evasiveness’ of a candidate’s answer depends on which of the ‘three’ perspectives (/positions) presented by the question-answer-answer sequence that the overhearing audience is most willing to adopt.

Persuasion is an important factor to politicians to show the power and influence the people. In the United States Presidential Election, debate is one of the tools to convey the candidates' message. Most of the utterances used in debates aimed at affecting and convincing the audiences or the voters. Persuasion according to Searle (1979) is regarded as a directive speech act in which the speaker’s intention is to make the hearers to commit him or herself to perform some form of action. Most of the researchers conducted persuasive speech acts from the point of view of discourse. There is no study about natural data like debates. This study is a study about observance of Cialdini’s principles of speech acts of persuasion in 2016 US presidential debates. Therefore, there are six principles that must be observed, namely consistency, authority, reciprocity, social-evidence, preference/ liking and rareness/ scarcity. It used descriptive qualitative method to get the findings. The findings of the study are proved that most of the presidential candidates observed Cialdini’s principles. They used several ways like asking the voter’s need, making a promise, and disfiguring the interlocutors. Finally, this thesis provides suggestion regarding to the findings. At this point, the first plan is to present some tested principles of persuasion in debate classes. Next point is how you might use the principles to increase community interest in your topic, and to win people over, fairly and ethically, to the way of thinking.

ABSTRACTExtant literature shows a positive link between presidential debates and political knowledge, with findings strongest for low-information voters. Considering presidential debates continue to retain a mass audience, they fulfill an invaluable civic function. Less clear is whether knowledge effects hold across debate formats and agenda topics. Using an experimental method that exposes a sample of undergraduate students to the 2012 US presidential debates, this article explores variance in knowledge effects across formats and topics. We find citizens can learn about issues and candidates but debate format and agenda topics may mediate the effects. We discuss the broader democratic implications of these findings and directions for future debate research.

The White House Correspondents' Dinner is an annual meeting where politicians, journalists, TV-stations‟ tycoons, and celebrities meet with the US president and listen to his speech. This year dinner has become too much of a Hollywood spectacle where the commander-in-chief‟s address was loaded with jokes and sarcasm. Comic discourse is rhetorical in nature since it is designed to persuade audience and change their future behavior through manipulating and changing the way they think. As often as not, comedians use ethos „comic authority‟, and kairos „tapering discourse according to the audience‟ to achieve their goals. The comedian‟s humorous message is of twofold. First, striving to solicit audience‟s responses to the invoked reference that is considered shared knowledge between the performer and the audience, and second, initiating the humor. Knowing who the audience is (the majority are actors and actresses), the US president chose to play the role of a stand-up comedian rather than the commander-in-chief and succeeded in drawing a wider attention, managing the situation, and eventually, to effect persuasion. Obama‟s jokes were intrinsic, i.e. they were taken from the immediate American context of culture and context of situation. All in all, he entered into the spirit of acting to align with his audience. By the use of comedy as a rhetorical device, Obama managed to solicit affiliative responses from his audience in a form of laughter and applause. Audience‟s laughter and applause show appreciation of what has just been said and indicate that a close attention is being paid to the talk. Bell (2001) argues that style (the degree of attention speakers pay to their speech when they involve in language interactions) is designed by audience rather than language users, i.e. speakers‟ ways of speaking differ based on the rhetorical pillar that states: „know your audience‟. In other words, speakers alter their speech depending on who their audience is at the moment of speaking. Keywords: persuasion, rhetoric, managing, style, identification, comedy, comedian, ethos, kairos, connection, affiliation, response.

Hedges and boosters are crucial metadiscourse markers to soften and strengthen the proposition. Presidential candidates also rely on hedges and boosters to draw the publics' intentions. This study aims to explore the use of hedges and boosters in Trump's and Clinton's utterances in the US presidential debates in 2016. Accordingly, discourse analysis was adopted in this present study to find out the realization of types and functions of hedges and boosters as well as the differences and similarities of the occurrences of hedges and boosters between those two candidates based on the taxonomies of Salager-Meyer (1997), Demir (2017), Rabab'ah and Rumam (2015) and Hyland (2005). The strategy was elaborated into six sub-research questions to find out types, functions, differences, and similarities of hedges and boosters. The data were obtained from the transcript of the debates. The findings reveal that the seven types of hedges and six types of boosters were discovered in the utterances of Trump and Clinton. Associated with the functions of hedges and boosters, it shows that Trump and Clinton tend to use hedging devices to mitigate their claims by showing some kind of uncertainty. Boosters also applied to put emphasis on the value of the truth of their statements. It was discovered that Trump used more boosters and Clinton used more hedging devices as well.

Social media is the primary platform for discussions and reactions during various social events. Studies in this space focus on the aggregate opinion and sentiment analysis but fail to analyze the micro-dynamics. In this work, we present a case study of the 2016 US Presidential Debates, analyzing the user opinion micro-dynamics across the timeline. We present an opinion variation analysis coupled with micro and macro level user analysis in order to explain opinion change. We also identify and characterize varied user-groups derived through this analyses. We discover that aggregate change in opinion is better explained by the differential influx of polarized population rather than the change in individual’s stance or opinion.

During the 2012 US presidential debates, more than five million connected viewers turned to social media to respond to the broadcast and talk politics with one another. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study examines the prevalence of humor and its relationship to visibility among connected viewers live-tweeting the debates. Based on a content analysis of tweets and accounts, we estimate that approximately one-fifth of the messages sent during the debates consisted of strictly humorous content. Using retweet frequency as a proxy for visibility, we found a positive relationship between the use of humor and the visibility of individual tweets. Not only was humor widespread in the discourse of connected viewers, but humorous messages enjoyed greater overall visibility. These findings suggest a strategic use of humor by political actors seeking greater shares of attention on social media.

Operating as a form of visual news discourse, editorial cartoons hold a unique commentary position within the news agenda. Utilising artistic and rhetorical devices, cartoon illustrators provide supplementary (and sometimes alternate) viewpoints on current news events; their visuals becoming frames for organising social knowledge in addition to capturing the essence of issues or events. By doing so, audiences are presented with “a number of different condensing symbols that suggest the core frame of any issue portrayed” (Gamson and Stuart, 1992, pg. 60). This thesis reflects upon the evolution of editorial cartoons as a genre of socio-political commentary. Scrutinising a corpus of images taken from the 2010 British General Election, the study outlines the aesthetic, communicative and rhetorical features which enhance the form’s position within visual imagery; highlighting their capability in adapting to societal, political or aesthetic change. Drawing upon the works of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Herrmann (2013) and Ritchie (2013), the thesis also illustrates how a conceptual approach towards editorial cartoon metaphors can amplify the forms’ convergence/divergence with the news agenda of its host publication. Lastly, a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses within a unified case study framework will highlight the capacity of editorial cartoonists to provide autonomous perspectives on evolving news events.

This research aims to investigate the face-threatening acts (FTAs) on illocutionary utterances found in a 2016 US presidential debate. A descriptive qualitative approach and document analysis were applied in this research. The data source of this research is the transcript of the last debate of the US presidential election in 2016. The illocutionary utterances were identified and categorized based on the five types of illocutionary utterances in Austin and Searle’s theory, and the data were analyzed using Brown and Levinson’s theory of FTAs. The result shows the illocutionary utterances that contain most FTAs are expressive illocutionary utterances (40.62%), directive illocutionary utterances (20.83%), assertive illocutionary utterances (17.70%), commissive illocutionary utterances (16.66%), and declarative illocutionary utterances (4.16%). Next, the most common FTAs the debater performs are the speaker’s negative face (33 times), followed by the hearer’s positive face, the hearer’s negative face, and the speaker’s positive face. This research has also shown that the speaker’s positive face does not always threaten the hearer’s positive or negative face, and vice versa.

We first describe the creation of a corpus of American presidential debates from the American presidency project. We then use the corpus to present a stylistic analysis of presidential candidates from 2000 to 2016. A range of stylistic measures, including vocabulary richness, language complexity, and readability measures is applied. We aim to contribute to the current debate on the complexity of American presidential rhetoric and the role of the register of spoken language, by furnishing empirical data.