PRACTICAL ARGUMENTATION IN AMERICAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE: Analysis of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address

Mariam Keburia

PRACTICAL ARGUMENTATION IN AMERICAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Analysis of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address

Authors

Mariam Keburia

Keywords:

practical argumentation, Critical discourse analysis, State of the Union address

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to analyze practical reasoning and practical argumentation schemes in the speeches of the 44^th President of the United States – Barack Obama. It looks into the State of the Union Addresses delivered annually in the United States Congress (2009-2012) and focuses on the selected text of 2010, applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as an analytical framework. Emphasis is put on the stated values behind the practical reasoning – analysis has shown that the Claims for action and Goals are guided by the values of unity, fairness and responsibility. Claims for Action and Means-goals’ relations to the set Goal of the identified practical argument are strong and reasonable. This paper also identifies common rhetorical devices used by the speaker to achieve persuasive rationalization of the advocated measures.

Full Text (PDF)

Author Biography

Mariam Keburia

Mariam Keburia is a PhD student at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Faculty of Humanities.
Her interests are related to Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) and argumentation in the contexts of
PDA. Mariam is particularly interested in research that uses text as a basis for analysis and identifies
values behind declared policies. During her PhD fellowship, Mariam has delivered several courses at
TSU (department of English Philology) enabling her to enrich language teaching experience and
develop research capacities.

References

Isabela Fairclough, Norman Fairclough, ,,Political Discourse Analysis: A Method for Advanced Students”, 2012;

Fairclough, N. Discourse and Text: Linguistic and Intertextual Analysis within Discourse Analysis. Sage journals, 1992b

Teun A. Van Dijk ,,Aims of Critical Discourse Analysis” 1995.

Teun A. Van Dijk ,,Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis” 1993

Agnieszka Sowinska, 2013 The example of freedom in President Bush's State of the Union addresses (A critical discourse approach to the analysis of values in political discourse, 24: 792 originally published online 10 June 2013 (Discourse Society 2008)

Published

2018-06-25

How to Cite

Keburia, M. (2018). PRACTICAL ARGUMENTATION IN AMERICAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE: Analysis of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address. Online Journal of Humanities ETAGTSU, (3), pages 12. Retrieved from https://etagtsu.tsu.ge/index.php/journal/article/view/60

Download Citation

Issue

No. 3 (2018)

Section

Articles

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

The peer-reviewd scientfic journal Online Journal of Humanities (OJH) CC BY-NC Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Licence for its users. It is fully open-accessed and ready to use, reproduce, disseminate or display the article provided that the author is attributed as the original creator and that the reuse is restricted to non-commercial purposes (i.e. research or educational use).