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A rhetorical analysis of the English speeches of Queen Rania of Jordan

The focus of this study is the area of discourse analysis. This thesis is a rhetorical analysis of the political discourse of Queen Rania of Jordan’s English speeches. The data of the study consist of 56 English speeches (56,706) words delivered by Queen Rania from 2001 to 2010 in different countries around the world. This study investigates how Queen Rania tries to convince the audience by using various rhetorical techniques. It investigates two main canons of rhetoric, invention and style, which are based on the classical Aristotelian classification of rhetoric. In analysing invention, her ethical, emotional and logical appeals to the audience will be examined in detail. In addition to that, this study analyses Queen Rania’s style in her speeches in a corpus-based study of two figures of speech, metaphor and metonymy. This study examines whether her speeches draw on the characteristics of the feminine style of women’s political discourse proposed by Campbell (1989a), Dow and Tonn (1993) and Blankenship and Robson (1995). The qualitative and quantitative analysis reveals that women’s political discourse has common features such as using personal experience to construct political decisions, being inclusive, believing in achievements, not mere words and promises and prioritising women’s issues and supporting their rights in the political arena. These observations support the results of the studies propounded by Campbell (1989a), Dow and Tonn (1993) and Blankenship and Robson (1995). It is argued that figures of speech such as metaphor and metonymy are not only used for ornamentation to make the speeches appealing to the audience; they are also used to call the audience to action and convince them to adopt certain ideas or change prior ones. It is revealed that political speeches use certain rhetorical techniques in order to persuade the audience such as employing rhetorical questions, telling stories, argumentation and identification, inter alia.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:582728
Date January 2013
CreatorsAmaireh, Hanan Ali
PublisherUniversity of Aberdeen
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=201840

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