Abstract
Drawing on overarching methodological frameworks of Hallidayan grammatical metaphor, Fairclough’s perspective on critical discourse analysis and rhetoric, this study attempts to posit a novel, integrated and practical approach to political, the media, advertisement and other discourses. To this end and based on the proposed approach, it aims to critically and eclectically exemplify and dissect three speeches delivered by Mr. Barack Obama, former president of the US, to first manifest the integrated approach practicality and adeptness through analysis; then by virtue of analysis to unveil how language is manipulated and distorted by orators in order to convey seamlessly intended messages and political creeds to the audience. Surveying recent annals of literature, to date no one has conducted an integrated study applying these disciplines in an individual paper and this study as a trial one can be useful for upcoming research. The analysis depicts practicality and efficiency of the integrated approach and displays that the speeches abound with nominalizations, modal verbs, parallelisms and antitheses. Furthermore, there are some three-part listing, the use of passivization, quotations and modality metaphors. Therefore, a tendency to utilize more nominalizations, parallelism and other devices by the speaker can be a fundamental reason for making his political language more powerful, impressive, persuasive and ambiguous as well.
Highlights
Language is an indispensable fabric of everyone’s life; it is a means of communication, and a social phenomenon by which we can communicate in different ways
Criteria for choosing political discourse as the sample and Mr Obama’s speeches are manifold: (a) the “salience”, multidisciplinary and multifacedness of the discourse of politics (Wodak, 1989); (b) few politicians’ speeches are much more dominant and effective than his rhetoric, (c) since his remarks have a ripple effect through the whole international affairs; (d) his addresses are succinct but precise, with no circumlocutions; (e) like most of political speeches, his are discreet, pre-planned and tactful, (f) they abound with a heterogeneous collection of religious, political and ideological creeds, (g) unlike the others, they are steeped in various strategies and discursive tropes; (h) eventually, in comparison to most of his predecessors, he has formidable political skills and impressive oratorical powers
In this paper we have analyzed ideological components embedded in three addresses of Mr Barack Obama; the analysis is grounded in Fairclough’s notions of ideology and importance of observing the grammatical aspects of discourse, Hallidayan Grammatical Metaphor (GM) in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and some rhetorical devices
Summary
Language is an indispensable fabric of everyone’s life; it is a means of communication, and a social phenomenon by which we can communicate in different ways. Due to the fundamental importance of language in politics and the media, politicians and the press have a tendency to employ particular forms of language to give their discourse allure and enchantment which allow them to transmit multiple notions and dogmas to various people with various orientations and beliefs at one time and within one piece of discourse; to this end and these functions, they manipulate their language in a subtle, objective, ambiguous and persuasive way. They equip their discourse with numerous distinctive attributes to serve its multifacetedness and multi-functionality essence concurrently
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