Cross-Cultural Pragmatics on Lexical Cohesion in President Obama’s and President Buhari’s Inaugural Speeches

Abstract

Numerous studies have revealed how Lexical Cohesion supported the fulfilment of political leaders’ persuasion intention in their rhetoric. The purpose of this study was to cross-culturally explore President Obama’s and President Buhari’s Inaugural Speeches to examine the impact of culture on the persuasive functions of Lexical Cohesion in their rhetoric. Therefore, while drawing on Pragmatics, the study adopted a qualitative discourse analysis approach, utilised an eclectic framework of Lexical Cohesion based on Hoey (1991), Martin (1992) and Eggins (2004) to analyse Obama’s and Buhari’s first inaugural speeches. The findings indicate, on one hand, that although Obama deployed more categories and more frequencies of Lexical Cohesion than Buhari did, ‘Repetition’ (50%) was the most dominant source of Lexical Cohesion in each of the two speeches. Moreover, the most reiterated item in the two speeches were personal pronouns, where Obama mostly repeated the pronoun ‘we’, which had inclusive function, and Buhari mostly repeated ‘I’ and the exclusive ‘we’. On the other hand, the findings suggest that Obama utilised Lexical Cohesion mainly for ‘emotional appeals’, ‘audience involvement’, and ‘credibility-building strategies’; while Buhari used Lexical Cohesion for ‘emphasizing his (and his team’s) personal commitment’, ‘building his credibility’, and ‘demonizing past administrations’. Finally, in the light of these findings, the study has drawn two major conclusions: (1) that on the preponderance of repetition of personal pronouns in both the two speeches, the findings suggest that the generic conventions of the use of personalised English in the inaugural address outweigh any culture-specific discourse practices of the two communities; (2) that Obama’s strategies of emotional appeals and audience involvement that enabled him to ‘speak along with his audience’, which contrast with Buhari’s strategies of emphasizing personal commitment and audience-exclusive tone that made him to ‘speak alone’, seem to have rendered Obama’s speech more interactional and more audience-engaging than Buhari’s speech.

Testing texture in presidential inaugural address

“…The findings further reveal that while Obama mostly used the inclusive "we", Buhari relied mostly on the exclusive "I". The preponderance of repetition in the inaugural speeches of Buhari and Obama, as uncovered in Malah's (2021) study, confirms a finding in Enyi and Chitulu's (2015) study, which shows repetition to be one of the most utilized cohesive devices in PIAs. Unlike Malah's (2021) study, which confirms only repetition as the dominant cohesive device in the two inaugural speeches he analyzed, Enyi and Chitulu (2015) identified repetition and other cohesive devices like synonyms, near-synonyms, superordinates and hyponyms as cohesive devices that were frequently deployed in the inaugural speech of President Goodluck Jonathan.…”

“…The findings revealed that President Obasanjo uses a variety of cohesive devices as rhetorical instruments. This style of communication by President Obasanjo is similar to that of President Obama, as shown in Malah's (2021) study, but contradicts the choices and frequencies of cohesive devices used by Buhari in the same study by Malah (2021). That is, although Buhari is not a native speaker of English like Obama, the former shares some commonality with Obama as far as the usage of cohesive devices in their respective inaugural speeches is concerned.…”

“…However, the novelty of this present investigation lies in its focus on grammatical cohesion in the inaugural speeches of selected Ghanaian and American presidents. Another difference between Malah's (2021) work and the present investigation is the theoretical framework used by these two studies. While Malah's (2021) study was based on the cohesive frameworks of Hoey (1991), Martin (1992) and Eggins (2004), this current study relies solely on Halliday and Hasan's (1976) cohesive framework as its analytical lens.…”

“…With regard to studies that have focused on texture in PIAs through the use of cohesive devices, it is worth mentioning Malah (2021), who did a cross cultural study of lexical cohesion in the inaugural speeches of President Obama and President Buhari. By making use of the cohesive frameworks of Hoey (1991), Martin (1992) and Eggins (2004), Malah (2021) observed that Obama used more categories and more frequencies of lexical cohesion in his inaugural speech than Buhari did. However, repetition appears in the two speeches as the most dominant source of lexical cohesion.…”

“…Though the literature reveals an array of research on PIAs, especially on how texture, through cohesion, is created in this unique sub-genre, there is still a research gap as regards how the cultural background of politicians affects the way they make use of grammatical cohesive devices as means of creating texture in their presidential inaugural speeches. Malah's (2021) study, to some extent, fills this gap by exploring lexical cohesion in the inaugural speeches of President Obama, who is an American and a native speaker of English, and that of President Buhari, who is an African and a nonnative speaker of English.…”