JOURNAL ARTICLE
Keywords: Political Discourse, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, CDA
Abstract: The present study aimed to explore the persuasive strategies used by Donald Trump and Joe Biden during their 2020 Presidential campaigns. Persuasion may take various forms and, in this study, we focused on how each candidate positively represent themselves while negatively representing their opponents. A corpus was created from six speeches delivered by each candidate with a total of 8 hours and 55 minutes and 42 682 words. AntConc was used to analyze data quantitatively by counting the occurrences of certain linguistic elements and help extract excerpt from the speeches. Later on, data was analyzed qualitatively using two theoretical frameworks: Van Dijk’s (1997) was used to detect the persuasive strategies used by each candidate and then these strategies were classified according to the general scope of Aristotle’s persuasive appeals. Results indicated that both candidates relied heavily on strategies which drew on pathos and ethos appeals such as metaphor, irony, victimization, actor description, comparison and categorization, with appeal to logos being less used. Results also showed that Joe Biden was able to persuade people which helped him win the 2020 presidential election and this was attributed to his neutral stance and wise use of strategies to promote justice and equality which his opponent did not focus on.
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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.
