Rhetorical Aspects of Political Speeches: Remain or Leave?

This thesis analyses rhetorical aspects of political discourse in two speeches given on Brexit by British politicians, David Cameron and Boris Johnson. Our study characterizes the formal aspects of the speeches, analyses the genre and arrangement of the speeches, and compares three modes of persuasion (pathos, logos, ethos) which are created through the employment of various rhetorical devices typically used in political discourse. The focus of our study is on metaphor, metonymy, syllogism and prolepsis. The objective of the thesis is to determine whether the political speakers put an emphasis on one of the three modes of persuasion in their speeches and how this contributes to the persuasiveness of their speeches. The study is based mostly on the concepts of traditional rhetoric and the methodology used and described by Jonathan Charteris-Black (2014), (2018) who combines traditional approaches to political discourse with approaches from critical discourse analysis. Therefore, the next objective of our analysis is to discover whether the application of this methodology provides insight into the style of political discourse