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Part of
Persuasive Games in Political and Professional Dialogue
Edited by Răzvan Săftoiu, Maria-Ionela Neagu and Stanca Măda
[Dialogue Studies 26] 2015
► pp. 55–84

… every time you’ve offered an opinion, you’ve been wrong

Obama dialogically interacting in the last 2012 presidential debate

| University of Vlora “Ismail Qemali” (Albania)

This paper describes the function of some important metadiscoursal devices such as hedges, boosters, attitude markers and transition markers in Obama’s discourse in the last 2012 presidential debate. Given their relatively high frequency in his political discourse, I expect that these devices are used as productive resources to help the speaker build an effective personal ethos in the dialogical interaction with the electorate, an initial hypothesis already confirmed in the indicative bottom-up analysis part of this article. Also, the argumentative nature of Obama’s discourse gives even more prominence to the use of such metadiscoursal devices to strategically communicate with the electorate and to create the intended rhetorical effects on it for persuasive ends.

Published online: 1 October 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.26.04tos
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Vasilyeva, Alena L.
2016. Confrontation and collaboration in the course of the election debate. Language and Dialogue 6:3 ► pp. 370 ff. DOI logo

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