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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

Hammering the message in: Rhetorical repetition and persuasion in political speeches

Sophie Raineri
Jukka Tyrkkö
  • Fonction : Auteur
Jenni Riihimäki
  • Fonction : Auteur
Anna Ishchenko
  • Fonction : Auteur
Zayna Jamal Halis
  • Fonction : Auteur

Résumé

Repetition is one of the easiest methods of persuasion, because it exploits the so-called illusory truth effect: the familiar is perceived as truer. Repeated exposure to select words and phrases can persuade and convince audiences that what they hear is true, even if it is not (e.g., Begg, Fanas & Farinazzi 1992; Moons, Mackie & Garcia-Marques 2009; Nilsson Björkestrand & Grigonytė 2020). Repetition creates rhythm and cohesion in text or speech, and can be used as a method of focusing attention or fostering internal allusions (e.g., Taraseva 2011; Charteris-Black 2018). Despite the manifest usefulness of repetition in political speech, quantitative corpus-based linguistic studies of the use of repetition are scarce, and this study aims at filling that gap. In our study, we use the Diachronic Corpus of Political Speeches to analyse transcripts of political speeches in English from the 1950s to present day. We first use the Pattern Analyser, a new corpus tool (to be made freely available at the conference) to identify all instances of repeated phrases within each speech along with their distributional patterns, and then classify them by type (grammatical or lexical) and by their position in a clause (initial, middle or final). We further analyse the audio or video recordings of c. 140 speeches to examine the extent to which special prosodic contours and gestures are associated with the repetitions (Debras 2021). According to our results, repetition is common in political speeches: almost 50 per cent of the speeches examined contains at least one 4-word sequence that is repeated three or more times within a short span of 30 words. Furthermore, repetition seems to be employed for a range of different purposes: while in some instances it is the repeated phrase that is highlighted, sometimes the repeated phrase itself is not important, but what it serves as an introduction to. References Begg, Ian Maynard, Ann Anas & Suzanne Farinacci. 1992. “Dissociation of process in belief: Source recollection, statement familiarity, and the illusion of truth.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 121(4): 446–458. Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2018. Analysing Political Speeches. Rhetoric, Discourse and Metaphor. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Debras, Camille. 2021. “How to prepare the video component of the Diachronic Corpus of Political Speeches for multimodal analysis.” Research in Corpus Linguistics 9(1): 132-151. Diachronic Corpus of Political Speeches. 2018-. Compiled by Jukka Tyrkkö, Jenni Räikkönen & Sophie Raineri. In development.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-04361333 , version 1 (22-12-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04361333 , version 1

Citer

Sophie Raineri, Jukka Tyrkkö, Jenni Riihimäki, Anna Ishchenko, Zayna Jamal Halis. Hammering the message in: Rhetorical repetition and persuasion in political speeches. Influence, Manipulation & Seduction 2: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Persuasive Language, Bayreuth University; Tampere University, Nov 2022, Virtual (Online), Germany. ⟨hal-04361333⟩
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