2.1 Persuasion in Politics
The main goal of political speech is to influence the views and choices of others (Wodak, 1989; Hahn, 2003; Fairclough, 2013). The definition of politics was given by Chilton (2004, p.3) as “ a struggle for power, between those who seek to assert and maintain their power and those who seek to resist it”. Beard (2000) found some distinctive features in British political speeches by using the method of critical discourse analysis. The success of a political speech depends not only on the content of the message but also on how the speaker delivers it (Tyrkkö, 2016). And Ghazani (2016) found that Obama’s discourses are more inclusive than Bush’s speeches. Some researchers have found Obama has developed his own “rhetorical signature” to be a president (Coe & Reitzes, 2010; Frank, 2011; Kienpointner, 2013).
Moses (2012) researched African leaders’ speeches and found they use various rhetorical strategies to represent their policies and persuade the people, such as modality, use of pronouns and contrasts. And if rational discussion is combined with rhetoric of efficient persuasion, it contributes to overcoming traditional party remarks (Kienpointner, 2013). Based on the use of persuasive speech acts, Altikriti (2016) gave a better comprehension of persuasion in political speech and found these speech acts are used to achieve some special purposes in an effective way rather than an arbitrary way. Language is very important for the speakers to convey their ideology to the audiences. With the primary aim of persuading people to follow political actions, linguistic manipulation is regarded as an influential tool in political speeches (Chilton & Schäffner, 2002; Benoit, 2003; Jalilifar & Alavi-Nia, 2012; Rezaei & Nourali, 2016). It can be seen that it is greatly significant to analyze the art of persuasion in presidential speeches to better understand how they efficiently persuade people to go under their leadership.