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Thesis (M. A. (English Studies)) --University of Limpopo, 2018 / This study contributes to the rekindled interest in rhetoric in the 21st century, with the rise of important politicians on the world stage. It investigates the different rhetorical devices used by politicians to get their audiences to consent to their ideas. Selected political speeches analysed in this study highlight the different rhetorical techniques used by notable politicians in public speaking platforms. These techniques include the use of plural pronouns, repetition, allusion, rhetorical questions, negation, comparatives, present and future tense, hyperbole, and personification. The political speeches analysed here are Barack Obama’s inauguration speech (2009), Nelson Mandela’s inauguration speech (1994), Thabo Mbeki’s “I am an African” speech (1996), Muhammadu Buhari’s inauguration speech (2015), and Mmusi Maimane’s SONA Debate speech (2015). The study found that all the five speeches make use of the identified rhetorical devices to ‘sell’ their ideas to their listeners and canvass their support. The study clarifies the concept of rhetoric in public speaking and also explains why people (listeners) may be persuaded by politicians to ‘buy’ their ideas, conveyed through manipulative political language. It is imperative that people be made aware of the influence that political rhetoric could have on their decision-making, particularly when public opinion is formed regarding events announced on public media. Members of the public or prospective voters will be able to distinguish the truth from falsehood, if they are familiar with the elements of rhetoric in political speeches. Politicians are likely to be stopped in their tracks from betraying public trust for personal gains. It is also important to realise that there is nothing wrong if politicians apply rhetoric in public speaking, as long as they have no intention of deceiving the listeners. However, modern-day politicians seem to use it differently. This study has identified various rhetorical devices used in the selected speeches that provide some understanding of how other terms such as persuasion and manipulation are related to rhetoric.Key words: language and power, manipulation, persuasion, politicians, political rhetoric, public speaking.

This dissertation explores the manner in which theological elements from a biblical literalist perspective undergird and authorize the historical memory texts produced by Christian nationalist advocates in support of conservative Protestant religious establishment. Christian nationalist discourses exploit notions of divine warrant, public remembrance, and "historical evidence" as means to read the nation and contemporary far right ideological commitments as biblically founded, and hence, as binding upon the nation. Focusing on the rhetoric of David Barton, Christian nationalist par excellence and Republican Party operative, I argue that discourses of Christian nationhood mobilize the theologies of providence, inerrancy, inspiration, and literalism as rhetorical strategies to situate God's law as the definitive legal standard through which American law and cultural values are (de)authorized. Drawing upon the presumptions of biblical literalism to present the textual "proof' of a Christian nation, the politics of this memory work (and the many ways these discourses presume to furnish textual proofs of a biblical nation) aims to influence and to shape public memory, opinion, political behavior, and policy formation in favor of far right Protestant hegemonic interests.

U.S. political leaders must be meritorious to warrant elected office but they also should be average so that they may demonstrate empathy and win the trust of citizens. Rhetoric makes this contradiction work, but no scholarship yet describes it satisfactorily. Worse yet, public opinion now holds politicians in historically low regard. But without a systematic understanding of how elected officials discursively bind themselves to the people, it is impossible to say if or why the rhetorical model of exceptional-ordinary leadership is failing. In this study I describe this rhetoric, which I identify as the Common Style. By listening to politicians' language choices across four speaking situations, I discovered that the Common Styles consists of distinct registers, each appealing to a conventional value, thereby indicating that politicians share something in common with everyday Americans. When speaking to a national audience under expectations of relative formality, as did presidents when delivering a weekly address, chief executives mostly appealed to the American work ethic through a language of production, and in this way presented themselves as honorable laborers. When answering a special-interest group's invitation to speak at one their meetings, governors and mayors relied on a language of progress to show themselves to be concerned with improvement, as were the citizens who joined these voluntary associations. On the nationally broadcast television talk show, leaders shared stories of their uncommon experiences and thereby satisfied the universal need to know what others go through and subtly implied that they, like everyone else, were mortal. When leaders were expected to think on their feet in the presence of local constituents--as they must at town-hall meetings--they turned to a conventional language of deference to indicate their esteem for voters and a mutual desire for respect. I conclude that U.S. politicians seek to build relations with citizens based on the presumption of shared values, but the resonance of these ideals in a fractured society remains uncertain. Future studies must therefore investigate the effectiveness of the Common Style with different swaths of ever-changing Americans. / text

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abstract: This study contributes to the literature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by offering rhetorical and discourse analysis of political graffiti on a wall built by Israel in Palestine. The analysis attempts to answer the urgent questions of why, who, when, how and for whom these graffiti exist. The data collected for the analysis consists of personal photos of graffiti taken randomly in 2010 and 2013 in Bethlehem, on the Palestinian side of the massive wall. Several theories in rhetoric and discourse analysis were consulted to perform the technical rhetorical and linguistic analyses of the graffiti utterances, images, and messages in selected photos of the graffiti. Social, physical, psychological and political factors that affect communication between the wall graffitists and their readers is discussed to assist in the interpretation of the messages of these graffiti from a Palestinian perspective. The findings of this qualitative study show that graffiti on such a high profile site are not typical of violent gang graffiti as commonly interpreted in the US, but rather contribute a universal interactive rhetorical mode employed by local and international graffitists to show their solidarity and demands for basic human rights for a misrepresented culture. Moreover, the wall graffiti function as evidence that graffiti has evolved into a formal performing art that can be found in respected art galleries. The wall graffiti create a dialogue between uncoordinated actors who come from different orientations to produce an array of positions not usually present in corporate media outlets. The analysis of the wall shows that these graffiti promote deep cultural and historical understanding, as well as break down boundaries and stereotypes. The collective threefold result of the analysis is the following: First, graffiti on the wall have a collective universal motive; second, the graffiti give voice to the voiceless; and third, the graffiti can prompt a sociopolitical change that can lead to a long overdue peaceful resolution to the conflict. Keywords: Political rhetoric, discourse analysis, Burke, Halliday, Banksy, political graffiti, street art, Arab graffiti, rhetorical and linguistic patterns, dramatistic, identification, universality, Palestine divisive wall, intertextuality / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2017

The purpose of the following study is to investigate if, and in what way, other parliamentary parties show similarities with the Swedish Democrats rhetoric in the speech on immigration and integration and, based on Bourdieu's concepts field, capital and doxa, offer a possible explanation for the other parliamentary parties' position through the speech on immigration and integration. In order to achieve the purpose, a framing analysis is made in which speech presented on Almedalen by the Social Democrats, the Left Party, the Moderates, and the Christian Democrats during the period 2009-2019 constitute the empirical material. The position of the investigated parliamentary parties in the political field through the speech on immigration and integration is explained on the basis of Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, and doxa. The study shows that the pattern of change among the parliamentary parties examined differs in the way of speaking but also in the existence of similarities with the rhetoric of the Swedish Democrats as well as the tendency to raise issues concerning immigration and integration. One conclusion that can be drawn is that an approach to the Swedish Democrats seems to entail changed rhetoric as well as an increased tendency to discuss immigration and integration issues. Another conclusion is that the existence of the Swedish Democrats means that the investigated parliamentary parties must somehow relate to them since neutral handling of them does not seem possible. A third conclusion is that nothing happens as an isolated event, but several factors cooperate in the change of the parliamentary parties' investigated speech on immigration and integration.

The recent rise of Western Europe's extreme populist Right (EPR) parties has been attributed to the EPR's mobilization of grievances over the issue of immigration (Ignazi 1991; Taggart 1996; Fennema 1997; Schain, 1998; Mudde 1999; Brubaker 2001; Ivarsflaten 2007). This study contributes to the literature on EPR's anti-immigrant rhetoric by examining whether different integration policies play a role in conditioning anti-immigrant rhetoric, and if so, what their role is in the formulation of such rhetoric. This thesis is comprised of two case studies: the French assimilation approach to immigrant integration and the rhetoric of Front National's leaders Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen; and the Dutch multicultural approach to integration and the rhetoric of Dutch Party for Freedom's leader Geert Wilders. The main hypothesis is that each leader's anti-immigrant rhetoric incorporates the shortcomings of the integration approach adopted by their respective governments. Elements of the rejection of both assimilationism and multiculturalism are detected in the FN's and PVV’s rhetoric, respectively, through a careful review of secondary and primary sources of language usage in Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen's and Wilders’ speeches, interviews, and media appearances

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The aim of this paper is to analyze how the Mumbai-based Hindu nationalist and regionalist/nativist political party Shiv Sena communicates about minorities through the Hindi version of its daily newspaper Saamana. After giving a brief introduction to Shiv Sena and the Hindu nationalist movement in India, the editorial articles published in the period Mon. 8/2-Sun. 14/2 2016 are analyzed within a theoretical framework based on Foucault and the idea that the public discourse itself is a field of battle where different actors can and do contest what is socially possible to express. The articles – as far as they are concerned with minorities – are found to be mainly preoccupied with Muslims, which are associated with Pakistan and terrorists and pictured as potentially fanatic and disloyal to the nation. / <p>Kandidatuppsats i indologi</p>