Abstract
The current study was concerned with the use of persuasion by President Obama, the former US president, as a discursive strategy in his two speeches delivered on 7/Aug/2014 and 10/Sep/2014 regarding ISIS. Analysis of these speeches was done by the application of Searle’s typology theory (1978), and pronoun analysis. That is, assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarative speech acts, first person singular and plural pronouns (inclusiveness and exclusiveness), and agency. The findings of the study revealed that assertives were the most frequent speech act utilized in both speeches. Considering the function of assertives, this study showed that President Obama’s major intention was to justify the airstrikes launched by the US army on ISIS’s zones in Iraq. Besides, first person plural pronoun analysis in terms of inclusiveness/exclusiveness showed that President Obama’s stance was a conservative one according to which American people’s justification of his assertions concerning ISIS could be the cornerstone of any further military action that would be undertaken by the US army against ISIS. These analyses held the same result regarding the importance of persuasion as a pivotal axis in his aforementioned speeches. As to the issue of agency, the results held that President Obama took a conservative stance relying upon the will of American civilians and submitting his agency to Americans’ ideals and power as shown by his total 34 commissives undertaken in these two speeches.
Highlights
According to Cook (2011), discourse analysis was first in ultimate service to structuralism and descriptive linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s
Considering the function that assertives serve, this study showed that President Obama’s major intention of using such discursive tools was aimed at justifying the airstrikes launched by the US army on ISIS’s zones in Iraq persuading Americans and reminding them that ISIS is a real threat to the country and the whole world, and, as a result, substantial measures should be adopted to put an end to their inhumane acts
As the total frequencies of the speech acts in the two speeches indicate (174 assertives, 24 commissives, 15 expressives, 9 directives, and 2 declarations) the overall pattern of the two texts is mainly founded upon the logic of convincement which is conservative in the political sense of the term
Summary
According to Cook (2011), discourse analysis was first in ultimate service to structuralism and descriptive linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s. Discourse is composed of two levels: a) Microstructural discourse level which is concerned with issues of cohesion; that is, the integration of discourse elements into a unified text; b) Macrostructural discourse level which deals with the knowledge of organizational features that are characteristic of genres which are conventionalized categories and types of discourse and interactional strategies; and, both of these levels are sensitive to the relationship between the linguistic elements and the communicative situations’ specifications in terms of context, culture, and content (Saville-Troike 2006) These linguistic elements can be used for a number of different functions such as those suggested by Hymes (1962): a) Expressive (Emotive), b) Directive (Conative, Pragmatic, Persuasive, Rhetorical), c) Poetic, d) Contact, e) Metalinguistic, f) Referential, and g) Contextual (Situational). This study can be replicated in analyzing other political rhetorical texts in order to reveal the persuasive strategies which are drawn upon or devised by political systems as either a justified persuasive rhetoric action against a threat or an opportunistic political act trained upon manipulative and narcissistic ends by, for example, totalitarian regimes
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