Language is a multi-layered mode of communication used to achieve a variety of goals. While poets and writers use language to entertain, politicians often instrumentalize language to manipulate people and persuade them with their ideologies. This is where discourse analysis proves to be crucial as it helps detect hidden meanings which reside with discourse and language. Discourse refers to any form of text, spoken or written, which is beyond the sentence level (Kinneavy, 1969). Political discourse as other various forms of discourse is defied defined by the social domain of their creation.
According to Al-Faki (2014), political discourse is a distinct genre delivered either in spoken or written mode, expressed via various forms including: policy papers, government press conferences, parliamentary discourse and electoral speeches. Political speeches are considered as part political discourse used mainly to persuade the audience with various political agendas such as healthcare, immigration and education policies (Denton & Hahn 1986). Language is used by political figures (presidents, parliament members, members of political parties) in a surgical way to promote their beliefs and ideologies. To do so, various linguistic devices are used to persuade the audience and convince them to accept their political agenda.
For (Kennedy, 2007) persuasion is a constituent part of political speech which entails the excessive use of persuasive strategies to change the beliefs, values or attitudes of the audience for the purpose of the speaker. In order for us to detect how politicians use these various ways to persuade their audience, we need to refer to discourse analysis. This latter emerged as a theoretical framework to analyse actual text and talk in the communicative context and evolved to become an interdisciplinary approach incorporating both linguistic and social analysis. CDA is one of the most widely used forms of discourse which aims to uncover ideological and power relations and proved efficient in the analysis of political discourse.
