War of words? A contrastive linguistic study of the political speeches of Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther King Jr., George W. Bush Jr. and Barack Obama, employing the ‘Wave Method of political speech analysis’

Abstract

This Masters Thesis attempts to de-mystify political speeches and their impact on their intended audience by proposing a method for political speech analysis that is at once easily accessible, linear, and systematic. Much excellent research has been done in linguistic analysis of political speeches by the likes of Van Dijk (1998), with his emphasis of the ‘Us versus them’ strategy, as well as Charteris-Black (2005) with an insightful examination of metaphors in political speech. Seminal work by Fairclough (1995) also points to the need of an analysis method of political speeches which takes into account the entire process of text creation and consumption. This Masters Thesis proposes both to incorporate these important pervious works in the results and analysis (section 4), as well as to elaborate on my own speech-writing experience to introduce an all-encompassing approach of political discourse analysis. This approach is both cross-disciplinary in its linguistic approach, drawing from both Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics, and easily accessible to a wider, perhaps skeptical public who may find their doubts about the political speech process reduced by a clear and insightful model for political speech analysis.