A text linguistic analysis of political speeches: A case study of Obama speeches

Abstract

This study attempted an analysis of political rally speeches. It specifically focused on the standards of cohesion, coherence, acceptability and situationality of speeches delivered by the current US President, Barrack Hussein Obama, Jr, during the 2008 run up US presidential election campaigns. The study basically employs textlinguistic framework and other communication theories especially the theories of persuasion set with a mission to unravel the spell binding elements in the speeches which saw Obama triumph overwhelmingly over his rival, the Senator John McCain, in the presidential race. This thesis is organized into five chapters. The first chapter is an introductory chapter. It treats introductory elements of this study i.e. introduction, statement of the problem, aims, rationale of the study, hypothesis, scope, literature review and finally methodology. The second chapter gives the theoretical foundation of the work. In an analysis of speech, many contentious terms whose definitions have varied use and application come into play. These terms are often viewed differently by different scholars creating diversity in unity. For ease of the task ahead, we have looked at terms like text, discourse, dialogue and monologue, cohesion, coherence, speech and rhetoric with a view to formulating a working definition of each concept as viewed in this work. The third chapter deals with cohesion and coherence in Obama speeches. This is an attempt to understand how Obama speeches hang together and how individual linguistic units: words, phrases, clauses and sentences relate with one another to come up with whole bundle. The bundle may be called a topic. Coherence principle investigates how the sub-topics form the larger topic Obama uses to persuade the American electorate into voting him. Utterances in a political speech, as has been shown, are a strung to a fragment in a way that is highly principled and fairly predictable. Obama's political speeches show a high degree of topic coherence and signaling as he moves from one paratone to another. The topic is, therefore, interpreted as a complex entity having a number of topic related elements contributing to it. The fourth chapter treats elements of Beaugrande's Acceptability and Situationality in Obama speeches. A speech is only acceptable to the audience if it meets the receiver's attitude in a communication context. Situationality, on the complementary explores what the speaker said, when does he say it, why does he say it, where does he say it, and how does he say it. The chapter examines why Obama says what, where, and how. In order to win the audience, Obama must persuasively and in a particular manner talk on a particular topic at a particular place. The last chapter is a conclusion. It offers a summary of the thesis and suggestion for further research. The study was library based although the appended speeches were downloaded on-line. The audio visual cassettes were also used for verification purposes. The written texts were analyzed focusing on specific areas of interest.