Rhetorical Analysis of King Abdullah's English Speeches during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This paper analyses King Abdullah's II English speeches during the Covid-19 crisis in a corpus-based study. It investigates the rhetorical techniques employed by the King to convince the audience. The data include 14 English speeches (8,694 words) delivered by King Abdullah II of Jordan during the Covid-19 crisis, from January 2020 to August 2021. The rhetorical analysis is based on the classical Aristotelian classification of rhetoric. It examines one canon of rhetoric, invention. In the analyzing invention, the speaker's ethical appeals (ethos), emotional appeals (pathos), and logical appeals (logos) will be examined in detail in a corpus-based study. The analysis reveals that King Abdullah II employs ethical appeals to identify himself with the audience and create a rapport with them by using first-person pronouns and lexical items like "my friends". The quantitative analysis shows that the inclusive pronoun we and the pronoun I am used for rhetorical reasons to convince the audience. Direct and indirect emotional appeals are also used to stir the audience's emotions to call them to action. King Abdullah II uses logical arguments such as an argument from statistics, quoting from the Holy Quran, and an argument from a dilemma, inter alia, to convince the audience of his viewpoints and persuade them to do specific actions.

Biden's Rhetoric: A Corpus-Based Study of the Political Speeches of the American President Joe Biden

“…Storytelling is a technique used by many political leaders such as Nixon, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, George Washington, Bill Clinton, and Queen Rania, to name only a few. This corroborates previous research revealing that storytelling is used in political discourse to influence the audience and arouse their emotions (Holloway, 1987;Jamieson, 1990;Stuckey, 1992;Lim, 2002;Andersen, 2008;Amaireh, 2013).…”

“…2 Pathos is concerned with speakers' ability to move, compel and stir the audience's emotions. 3 In logos resides the ability to give truth via means based on reasoned and convincing arguments. The traditional customs of rhetoric extended from the orators' act of communicating their character or personality, employing straightforward, emotional language and picking appeals with the intent of persuasion, influencing and changing the behaviour of the readers or listeners, and convincing the audience in a logical way (De Wet, 2010; Burke, 2020).…”