A CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDY OF A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE’S SPEECH
A CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDY OF A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE’S SPEECH

Summary/Abstract: This paper takes a brief glimpse into an American political speech. In order to make such an endeavour, the authors have turned their attention to concepts and terms such as rhetoric, persuasion, argumentation, discourse, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, text, cohesion, coherence, intertextuality, words, collocations, power, ideologies, social constructivism, context, implicature, inference and so on. The paper studies the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech (2016). The research addresses the key elements of structure, rhythm, cohesion and coherence of the speech, tracing also the systemic feature of intertextuality. Focusing on detecting stylistically relevant rhetoric devices sustaining persuasive strategies within the political speech under discussion, the paper explains the major importance of the classic yet very productive rhetoric “rule of three”, the structural parallelism, enumeration, repetition.

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