Persuasion Strategies in Saudi Arabia Vision 2030 Document: A Critical Discourse Analysis Approach

Abstract

By adopting a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, this paper explores the strategies of persuasion employed in the Saudi Arabia Vision 2030 document. More specifically, the paper attempts to identify the various persuasion strategies used in the document of the 2030 Vision, the way through which these persuasion strategies are linguistically manifested, and the different modes of persuasion used in the document. The primary research questions of this study are: first, what are the different modes of persuasion employed in the Saudi Arabia 2030 Vision? Second, what are the strategies of persuasion used in the document under investigation? Third, how are these strategies linguistically manifested in the document at hand? Findings reveal that there are five strategies that are highly representative as persuasion conduits in the Saudi Arabia 2030 Vision. These include lexical choices, the inclusive ‘we’, religionization, future promises, and compositional summarization. The five strategies accentuate the assumption that the process of persuasion is successfully communicated at the various levels of linguistic analysis: lexically, semantically, pragmatically, and stylistically.