A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Language of Persuasion in Political Discourse

الملخص

This paper tackles critical discourse analysis henceforth (CDA) of the language of persuasion in political discourse. CDA studies the relationships between the  social power abuse, dominance, and inequality whether in the political discourse  or in the  social domains. Therefore, the researcher tries to investigate the persuasive strategies in political discourse with special reference to the second debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the US presidential elections campaign (2016).  The present study aims at finding out the persuasive strategies that are used by the two candidates in the debate. For the analysis of the data, the researcher adopted Aristotle the traditional rhetorical strategies as a model. The current study is based on the following hypotheses: Both candidates use the Aristotle’s persuasive strategies in their speeches in order to persuade the audience. There is a strong relationship between the linguistic choices (lexical, syntactic or rhetoric choices) and persuasion. The study looks forward to locate the considerable features of political discourse in terms of persuasive strategies.