Use of Persuasive Language to Coax the Audience: A Study of John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama’s Speeches

Political language is marked with the feature of persuasiveness and is starkly different from the ordinary language through the application of rhetorical figures. In fact, it differs substantially from ordinary language in terms of using vocabulary, structure and tone of voice which are considered the fundamental tenets of persuasive language. In this respect, the aim of this paper was to find out how Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) plays a vital role in unraveling the hidden ideas by scrutinizing the presence of power in political speeches through undertaking a rigorous scrutiny of the speeches of two of the former presidents of the USA and distinguishing them from daily speeches of common people. To this end, five speeches by John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, two of the former presidents of USA, who have been able to move a large audience to support their campaigns by employing rhetorical language were analysed. The findings revealed that the success of these two presidents lies in their manipulation of different linguistic and literary devices, such as parallelism, euphemism, alliteration and metaphor to set forth their ideas. The results also implied that the presidents’ special discourses have enabled them to reinforce values dear to American society such as: unity, the sense of bond, and nationalism in their electoral campaigns and afterwards in their administration