Linguistic Manifestations of Engagement and Persuasion in Contemporary US Sermons from the African American Episcopal and Southern Baptist Affiliated Genres: A Critical Discourse Analysis

The art of persuasion and persuasive communication has existed for centuries. Notably, one of the first recorded analyses into this type of discourse comes from Aristotle's treatise Rhetoric, The Art of Rhetoric. Per Aristotle, rhetoric is used as a means "to impress the hearers and influence them for or against a certain course of action" (1926), specifically, how a speaker engages and influences their audience through persuasive discourse. This study focuses on the linguistic data comprised from chunks of three sermons by three different preachers and aims to answer the question: what linguistic features are found in the genre of the American sermon that are used to engage and persuade listeners? I posit that linguistic features such as repetition, list of three, imagery and metaphor are employed by the preachers to align themselves with their audience and, furthermore, that preachers use emotion-evoking language to foster a sense of solidarity and unity with the listening audience. The method of research for this study is a critical discourse analysis (CDA). Employing a CDA elucidates power shift and inequality between speaker and audience. The CDA is performed on three segments of sermons and each text has been chosen from a sermon which bears a similar theme, the theme being high-profile life events (two hate crimes and a son's suicide). The research from this study aims to give insight into how these speakers are so successful in their speech acts, and to conclusively chart similarities and differences in persuasive linguistic features between preachers across a similar denomination, with a final goal of determining how each speaker employs various styles of rhetoric as a means of persuasion.