Speaker’s verbal behavior and collective audience responses in Korean political oratory

An analysis was conducted of the discourse of South Korean political speakers in relation to collective audience responses, based on three situational contexts. Results showed marked contextual differences in the formatting of messages used to invite audience responses. In campaign speeches, explicit (dialogic) rhetorical devices (RDs) occurred most frequently, thereby supporting Bull and Miskinis’ (2015) hypothesis that such RDs are characteristic of political speech-making in collectivist far eastern societies. However, this hypothesis was substantively qualified by findings that (1) in the acceptance and inauguration speeches, implicit RDs were utilized more frequently than explicit (dialogic) RDs, and (2) in those two contexts, it was non-formatted messages that occurred more frequently than either explicit or implicit RDs separately.

Cicero

This engagingly written book offers an innovative account of Cicero’s treatment of key political ideas: liberty and equality, government, law, cosmopolitanism and imperialism, republican virtues, and ethical decision-making in politics. Cicero (106–43 BC) is well known as a major participant in the turbulent politics of the last three decades of the Roman Republic. But he was a political thinker, too, influential for many centuries on the Western intellectual and cultural tradition. His theoretical writings stand as the first surviving attempt to articulate a philosophical rationale for republicanism. They were not written in isolation either from the stances he took in his political oratory of the period, or from his discussions in his voluminous correspondence with friends and acquaintances of immediate political issues or questions of character or behaviour. The book situates the intimate interrelationships between Cicero’s writings in all these modes within the historical context of a fracturing traditional Roman political order, while exhibiting the continuing attractions of his conceptual landscape, as well as some of its limitations as a response to the crisis that was engulfing Rome.

The Rhetoric of Digital Presentation Tools in Politics: The Case of Visual Knowledge in President Obama's Enhanced State Of the Union

President Barack Obama's State of the Union speeches were distributed online as so–called Enhanced versions, where the television images of Obama delivering the speech were accompanied by pictures, graphs, and tables used to convince the audience about the factual state of affairs in the United States. The article explores this combination of the rhetoric and epistemology of visuality and information design on the one hand and political oratory on the other. The article demonstrates how the Enhanced State of the Union is a hybrid genre using visuals to create a rhetoric of reification and reality, apparently aiming not to argue but only to establish facts.

Conceptual Metaphors in President Muhammadu Buhari's Political Rhetoric

Conceptual metaphors continue to receive scholarly attention from discourse analysts taking political discourse seriously. Studies are often interested in the versatile discourse functions of metaphors; how political leaders deploy them as powerful weapons in their armory of political oratory. Therefore, this study extends the current knowledge by exploring conceptual metaphors in President Muhammadu Buhari’s political rhetoric. It was guided by two major questions: (1) What types of conceptual metaphors does President Muhammadu Buhari deploy in his political rhetoric? and (2) What rhetorical functions do the Conceptual Metaphors deployed in President Muhammadu Buhari’s political rhetoric perform? The study’s theoretical impetus was Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), and Charteris-Black’s (2009) Contemporary Model of Metaphor and Political Communication was also applied in the analysis. The speeches analyzed include: (1) Muhammadu Buhari’s Presidential Primaries Speech, (2) Muhammadu Buhari’s Acceptance Speech, (3) Muhammadu Buhari’s Victory Speech and (4) Muhammadu Buhari’s (First) Presidential Inaugural Speech. The results show that President Buhari, in his political rhetoric, mostly uses HUMAN metaphors (32%), WAR metaphors (21%) and JOURNEY metaphors (16%). Moreover, further analysis revealed that Buhari mostly uses conceptual metaphors to establish his ethical integrity, heighten emotional impact and communicate his anti-corruption and political ideologies. The study concluded that conceptual metaphors are vital resources for construction of persuasion in President Muhammadu Buhari’s political rhetoric.

Greece, Rome, and the Revolutionaries of 1916

This chapter argues for a tension in the writings of Patrick Pearse, with some discussion also of Thomas MacDonagh, between commitment to the Gaelic and Catholic movement, which had eclipsed the classicism of earlier political rhetoric, and a marked interest in classical culture. Following an overview of the reception of classical rhetoric in political oratory before Irish independence, Pearse’s essays and speeches are analysed and shown to be permeated with classical tropes. Pearse’s oration for O’Donovan Rossa is discussed in particular detail, and it is suggested that the affinities with Thucydides in this funeral oration may have been mediated by Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, with which Pearse was familiar.

The Deaths of the Republic

This book examines imagery of the body politic in the works of Cicero and his contemporaries and explores its impact on the politics of Rome in the first century BCE. Emphasis throughout is on the ideological underpinnings of such images and their uses as a means of persuasion. Chapter 1 reads the well-known fable of Menenius Agrippa as a paradigm for late-republican invocations of the embodied state. Chapter 2 examines imagery of disease and healing, focusing especially on connections with political violence. Chapter 3 considers claims of wounding and mutilating the republic. Chapter 4 explores references to the body politic’s demise in invective and consolations. Political oratory provides much of the evidence of these chapters, but is everywhere supplemented by other sources. Chapter 5 historicizes prior discussions by focusing on a single controversial image, that of murdering the fatherland, in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination.

Speaking the Nation

Untangling the logical, lexical, and semantic patterns of the multiple official speeches of Indian prime ministers, Speaking the Nation gauges how the Indian state has been projected by different governments in different times, in the face of challenges from internal and external actors that put pressure on its leaders to safeguard their status as legitimate elites in power. It analyses how Indian nationhood is consistently reshaped and reaffirmed by invoking its secular ethos and practice, as well as the experience of market liberalization. The book calls for serious engagement with political oratory in India. A close reading of speeches since 1991—from Narasimha Rao to Narendra Modi—it captures how, through these crosscutting topics, the prominent ‘authors of the nation’ and the ‘vanguards of the state’, speak India into being.