Style And Arguments’ Arrangement In President Biden Speech 2023 : Linguistic-Rhetorical Constructs For Power Orientation

Abstract

Language and politics have been closely intertwinned since Ancient Greecks’ times when rhetors beautified speech through the mastery of oral ‘canons’ for impression-management and audience persuasion (Aristotle, 2015). These semiotic skills continue in modern political rhetoric where arrangement and style make up two prominent canons that reflect ingenuity and pivot discourse to the speaker’s orientations. Style is a powerful vehicle mastered by politicians to envisage an artful and effective communication (Leeuwen, 2008). Arrangament features in the “distribution of arguments discovered in the proper order” (Cicero, cited in May and Wisse 2001 : 67). In this framework, this research paper examines ‘arrangement’ and ‘style’ as faculties of oratory (Finucane, 2022 : 1) in political discourse. The corpus under study is a speech : « Remarks by President Biden ahead of the One-Year Anniversary of Russia’s Brutal and Unprovoked Invasion of Ukraine ». Qualitative research is selected to analyze the two analytic angles of ‘style’ and ‘arrangement’. The framework applied to this study is twofold : Fairclough and Fairclough (2012) and Ponton (2020) to study the linguistic and the rhetorical cues in the corpus. Following analysis, findings have revealed that President Biden arguments are discursively arranged and that his style is the outcome of a strategy of language manipulation to suit his speech context and purpose (Hariman, 2010).