Exploring Rhetorical-Discursive Practices of Rouhani�s Presidential Campaign and Victory of his Prudence-and-Hope Key: a Discourse of Persuasion

Abstract

Abstract. Trying to acquire and maintain power, politicians make use of certain rhetorical and linguistic devices to persuade voters in favor of their particular views constructed in the political discourse. The current study was an attempt to investigate Iranian president Hassan Rouhani's use of persuasive rhetorical-discursive devices during his campaign for presidency in 2013. Specific attention was paid to the levels of language that constituted his political discourse through: 1) scrutinizing the level of sound, 2) investigating his selection of lexical elements, and 3) looking into syntactic structures employed to convey political nuances. Additionally, a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, drawing upon Fairclough's three-dimensional analytical framework (2010), was adopted to probe the discourse-power relationship in his discourse, on the one hand, and the socio-cultural, religious, and political values underlying the rhetorical devices, on the other. The results revealed that Rouhani's political discourse was embroidered with different rhetorical-discursive devices such as tripartite constructions, repetition in parallel lines, alliteration, and metaphor to influence the public opinion. Moreover, perhaps, using a concise and succinct message, visual symbols, and dynamic metaphors helped him reach out to the audience with an air of emotion and mobilize significant numbers of the electorate for himself.

NATIONAL SPEECHES ON NOTABLE POLITICAL FIGURES: A position paper on CDA studies

“…In the methodical analysis of the Republic of Philippine's President Rodrigo Roa Duterte's thirty (30) political speeches, Rubic-Remorosa (2018) explicated the linguistic choices of the President to depict the underlying social issues (power, context, and mind control) and ideologies. The author relied on the socio-cognitive postulate of van Dijk, the three-dimensional framework of Norman Fairclough and Woods' discourse of politics (a function of persuasive linguistic techniques) to uncover the linguistic features (modality, transitivity, pronouns, etc.)…”

“…An interdisciplinary framework theoretically grounded in Fairclough's approach to CDA was adopted to analyze the religious, socio-cultural, political values and ideology embedded in the discourse of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during his campaign for the presidency in 2013. The analysis by Mirzaei (2017), depicted the contrastive position (the social struggle of moderates) of Rouhani in juxtaposition with that of his predecessor (fundamentalist). Readers also observe the President's ideology, as representative of his party, in the carefully crafted rhetorical devices deployed to counter the status quo, chart a bond with the voters and win them over.…”

Political Discourse, Code-Switching, and Ideology

“…Political discourse is inherently different from other types of discourse (Hay 2013) in that the promotion of individual and party interests is valued over everything else, and therefore calculated deceit is a routine practice (Corner 2003). Since a politician's main goal when speaking is to persuade the audience to their position, they are naturally attuned to every verbal nuance in their discourse (e.g., Davletbaeva, Yashina & Sharafieva 2016;Mirzaei, Eslami, & Safari, 2017;Ponton, 2016;Quam, & Ryshina-Pankova, 2016). Politicians try to make their speech clear and comprehensible for all members of the audience so that the agenda they are promoting is easily understood (Davletbaeva et al 2016); this includes developing compelling and convincing arguments.…”

Innovations of the new public administration language: professionally prestigious sociolectisms or the signs of communicative failures?

“…They reflect the tendency towards standardization of a professional language in the methods of its subjectivation, individual fixation, individual appropriation" (Karaulov 2002;Ponton, Larina, 2017), caused primarily by a "consistent decrease in communication" (Chemist, 2010), and there is a change in status-role relations, a displacement of communication tonality to informality, washing of severity and clarity in the presentation of information, and also the inclusion of an emotionally expressive component. It is quite obvious that the written form of communication in the field of public administration is significantly influenced by the oral speech, and the results of such an impact are manifested in all aspects: from lexical to communicative-pragmatic (Maillat, Oswald 2013;Saki 2016;Mirzaei, Eslami, 2017).…”