Genre Analysis Of Political Speeches On Terrorism

Political speech has always been in the focus of different kinds of research,mainly because this specific discourse type shapes people's opinions and views as well as controls their mind and will.Terrorism is viewed today as a crucial social issue.This unlawful act of violence is used by the terrorists to threaten people and make them fear.In the light of high regularity,geographical coverage and the number of victims which terror acts bring,special attention is given to political speeches on terrorism.With the aim of assisting people from different countries to understand the content of political speeches on terrorism in a more appropriate way and providing aid to the politicians to produce a more comprehensible and consistent speech,it is essential to make an analysis of the generic structure of political speeches on terrorism.Although,there has been made a lot of research on genre analysis of different kinds of political speeches,still there is a great gap in genre analysis of political speeches on terrorism,as most of the studies on terrorism already carried out are made using Critical Discourse Analysis as a tool or are connected with the content analysis of the term –the researchers within their studies mainly focus on how to define terrorism in a more appropriate way and on how to identify the main components of this notion.The deficit of the existing literature on genre analysis of political speeches on terrorism and the necessity to investigate their schematic structure and linguistic features to provide assistance for the readers and listeners to understand all the aspects and details of the speeches and to help the speakers to make a more logical and a better structured speech provokes the incitement to do this particular kind of research in the field of applied linguistics.Thus,the data needed for the present thesis represent political speeches on terrorism delivered by the senior official of the country.The corpus for the present research consists of fifteen political speeches devoted to terrorism,enounced after a terrorist attack happened.All the speeches were chosen at random from the internet resources www.yandex.ru,www.google.ru,www.youtube.com and were transcribed manually.In the first phase,the concept of Bhatia's(1993)genre analysis model is used to identify text-external characteristics and organizational structure of the speeches,and Systemic functional linguistics interpersonal and ideational metafunctions are used to investigate the general linguistic features of each political speech.In the second phase,an expert within the field of genre analysis is consulted so as to obtain a second opinion on the achieved results.After detailed analysis of the speeches,there were identified eight moves in political speeches on terrorism.According to the frequencies of each move,they were divided intoobligatory,conventional and optional.As a result,the rhetorical structure obtained after the move-structure analysis comprises four steps: Greeting the audience,Introducing the topic,Offering condolences and Assuring the safety.Linguistic features which can characterize political speeches on terrorism include modal verbs would,will,shall and should,pronouns we and I,present tense,low percentage of nominalization and of passive voice constructions.After the second rater's research and a comparison between the two analyses,it was found out that the level of inter reliability rate is high,proving the validity and accuracy of the obtained results.Analysis made in the present research provides an insight into the generic structure and linguistic features of political speeches on terrorism which assists both the audience and the speakers.Thus,using the results of the present study,the listeners could grasp the ideas and the main sense of the speeches in a more thorough and profound way,and the speakers could deliver a better organized and a more comprehensible speech.What is more,current study facilitates to the future research on the analysis of the structure and linguistic features of other kinds of speeches using the methods of the present study.