Critical Discourse Analysis of Barack Obama's 2012 Speeches: Views from Systemic Functional Linguistics and Rhetoric

What is it about?

In the light of Halliday's Ideational Grammatical Metaphor, Rhetoric and Critical Discourse Analysis, the major objectives of this study are to investigate and analyze Barack Obama's 2012 five speeches, which amount to 19383 words, from the point of frequency and functions of Nominalization, Rhetorical strategies, Passivization and Modality, in which we can grasp the effective and dominant principles and tropes utilized in political discourse. Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis frameworks based on a Hallidayan perspective are used to depict the orator’s deft and clever use of these strategies in the speeches which are bound up with his overall political purposes. The results represent that nominalization, parallelism, unification strategies and modality have dominated in his speeches. There are some antithesis, expletive devices as well as passive voices in these texts. Accordingly, in terms of nominalization, some implications are drawn for political writing and reading, for translators and instructors entailed in reading and writing pedagogy.

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Why is it important?

To sum up, the analysis of Mr. Obama’s 2012 speeches infers that the addresses were prepared by a deft orator and are not impromptu speeches. Meanwhile, multiple linguistic and rhetorical strategies are exploited for the efficiency of the speeches. They are inextricably intertwined and, at times, it is hard to uncouple one from another as they are often multifunctional. The tendency and priority to apply more nominalization, passivization and modal verbs by the political orator in Mr. Obama’s speeches are the vital reasons for making his language powerful, impressive, persuasive and ambiguous as well. Primarily, by metaphorizing a process and passive voicing, Mr. Obama can mirror a fact, or express his intended meanings implicitly as in a compact and dense forms. Secondly, nominalization is a means to assist him to expand his discussion cohesively and step by step, which employs compound passages encapsulated in nominal forms as theme. Finally, nominalizations construct and contribute to abstraction, generalization, impersonality, objectification, information load, language economy and cohesion, ambiguity and, of course, beauty of the texts. Upon listening as well as reading Mr. Obama’s speeches, it will be noticed that, in nearly all paragraphs, there are some eye-catching tropes along with plenty of recurrent syntactical and lexical clauses attracting the audience and readers attention. Besides, it is immediately apparent from the selected speeches that President Obama relies heavily on rhetorical devices, particularly, parallelism tropes and unification strategy. Rhetorical devices investigated in the study are used as persuasiveness properties to improve the effectiveness, clarity, and beauty of the speeches. The aims are to persuade, to inform, to convey personal ideologies, to emphasize inter -relatedness of delivered messages, to signify differentiation, and to demonstrate orator’s solidarity with the audience.

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