A Rhetorical Study Of David Cameron's Political Discourse-Three Appeals As Discourse Strategies In The Debate

The televised prime ministerial debates, as an important part of the western political genre, play a significant role in the political life and become one of the major popular means of political communication. It is no exception to the United Kingdom. The first time for the UK to introduce the form of TV debate becomes a focal point of the prime ministerial campaigns.As the participants of political activities, candidates communicate with the audience through their rhetorical construction of argumentative discourse to achieve persuasive goals, namely, convince the audience to vote for them as the next prime minister of the United Kingdom. Despite the importance of televised debates, there are only a few scholars who have conducted researches on them from the perspective of linguistic and rhetoric, which are helpful to understand the debates from various aspects. However, there still remains some space to be further studied.With Lloyd Bitzer's rhetorical situation as the theoretical foundation, Aristotle's analytical tool of three appeals as the discourse strategy and the quantitative and qualitative methods as the theoretical framework, this thesis chooses the text of David Cameron's argumentative discourse in the first 2010 UK televised debate as a research subject and aims to investigate the rhetorical situation and show how three types of appeals are used by Cameron. Three Appeals of logos, pathos and ethos can be employed solely or as a combination at the same time, however, the author separates them from one another in this paper just for the convenience of analysis.Through the carefully-conducted analysis, the author gets some major findings as follows. Firstly, it is found that the political background information is the foundation of the political argumentative discourse and it is the key to the success of debate only when the debaters can grasp every chance to express themselves well according to the fitted rhetorical situation. The purpose of emphasizing on the specific rhetorical situation is to help debaters know what and how they should do in the debate. Secondly, three appeals, according to Aristotle's rhetoric, are used as rhetorical strategies. These three persuasive means (logos, pathos and ethos) are realized and managed in David Cameron's political argumentative discourse successfully. To achieve logos, Cameron utilized enthymeme, facts and statistics to appeal to the mind of audience. For pathos, he skillfully used negation, rhetorical questions and evoked the audience's emotions like anger, fear, hope and patriotism by appealing to the common values of the British people. To establish his ethos, he successfully identified himself with the audience by showing his virtue and intelligence. Thirdly, of the three appeals, it is found that the persuasive means of pathos is most generally presented and used more frequently than another two appeals throughout the analysis of David Cameron's discourse, mainly for its adaptation to the rhetorical situation of the campaign that British people were confronted with.