The Study On Persuasion In English Political Speeches Through Metadiscourse

Metadiscourse, as a relatively new concept in discourse analysis, has attracted an increasing attention in recent years. Scholars have investigated metadiscourse in a range of genres and settings. However, the studies focus mainly on written discourses, English political speeches, as a subgenre of public speaking, are rarely touched upon.Political speeches, which are mainly used by the speaker to convince people to take actions or change attitudes, are persuasive in nature. The author of the present thesis selects 20 classical English political speeches as the data, and makes a study on the realization of persuasion in English political speeches through metadiscourse. The study adopts Hyland's interpersonal model of metadiscourse to identify the metadiscourse subcategories and takes the three modes of persuasion as its frame for analysis. The three modes of persuasion are logos (rational appeals), ethos (credible appeals) and pathos (affective appeals), which are respectively related to the logic of the text, the speaker's credibility and the audience's emotion.After a detailed analysis, the author finds that interactive metadiscourse such as transitions, frame markers, code glosses, evidentials and endorphoric markers which mainly deal with text itself can contribute to the rational appeals of persuasion by facilitating comprehension of the text; Interactional metadiscourse such as hedges, boosters, engagement markers and attitude markers together with evidentials which are mainly concerned with the personality of the speaker can contribute to the credible appeals of persuasion; Engagement markers, attitude markers, self mentions, hedges and boosters which are concerned with the audience's emotion can contribute to the affective appeals of persuasion. Moreover.through a quantitative analysis, the author also finds that transitions and frame markers play more important roles in contributing to rational appeals; Hedges and boosters are two most commonly used device to achieve credible appeals; Engagement markers as well as self mentions are the most explicit metadiscourse to achieve affective appeals.The thesis studies metadiscourse from a new perspective-how it helps to achieve persuasiveness of English political speeches. It is hoped that the research would enrich the study of metadiscourse.