A MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO GENRE-BASED ANALYSIS OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL WAR ADDRESSES

Abstract

ABSTRACT Presidential war rhetoric has attracted the interests of several studies on critical discourse analysis and rhetoric. Little research considers, so far, the application of genre analysis in identifying presidential war rhetoric as a genre. This study explored the typicality of the obligatory rhetorical moves of the texts and how they are employed to justify American military actions as the communicative purpose of the genre in question. The study also investigated the lower-level patterns employed within these moves. Specifically, the study identified what Aristotle’s types of rhetoric (epideictic, deliberative or forensic), illocutionary speech acts, and lexico-grammatical features are used in these rhetorical moves and how they are employed to realise their communicative functions. This study is a genre-based analysis to identify and explain ‘what is said’ and ‘how is said’ in American presidential war addresses. A total of twelve American presidential war addresses were selected. The analysis adopted Bhatia’s model on genre analysis along with Aristotle’s types of rhetoric, and Bach and Harnish’s model on speech acts. NVivo 12 was used in the analysis of the data. The findings indicated that the presidents at the onset of any military action organised their war addresses on a succession of seven obligatory moves taking into account not only the speaker’s communicative purpose, but also the surrounding events, the needs of the audience, and the ethics of the Just War Theory. In addition, the consistency between the communicative function of each rhetorical move and its rhetorical, and linguistic structures explained why the presidents write their discourses the way they do. For example, an epideictic type of rhetoric and an informative type of speech acts were frequently employed in strategy 1, precipitating event showing the enemy's act of aggression of move 1 to report about the newly happening event, and to provide a sense of comfort through familiarising audiences with the event. The same was also true for the linguistic features in this specific strategy of move 1. Lexicon was aimed to label the time of the aggression and divide the world into two contrastive realms, before and after the aggression. Past tense was also employed to narrate recently happened aggressions and to mark the boundary of the divided world. As such, the study implies that genre analysis is not only applied to investigating academic and professional discourses, but is also insightful in investigating the generic competence of presidential discourse. Understanding presidential war addresses as a genre type of presidential discourse helps the ESL/EFL teachers and students to learn and acquire the generic competence of producing and interpreting this specific type of genre. The study concludes that presidential war rhetoric as a genre is carefully crafted in terms of its communicative ends, and a fusion of its varied rhetorical and linguistic strategic typifications.