The pen is mightier than the sword
Malala Yousafzai’s reaction to verbal and nonverbal aggression in her 2013 UN-speech
Manfred Kienpointner | University of Innsbruck, Austria
On October 9, 2012 Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani schoolgirl, was severely wounded by a Taliban assassin’s bullet.
This was the culmination of a history of conflict in the Swat valley region of north-western Pakistan. The historical, ethnic,
political and religious reasons for this conflict are manifold. After several surgeries in Pakistan and Great Britain, Malala
Yousafzai miraculously recovered from her serious injuries and was even able to give a speech at the United Nations Youth Assembly
on her 16th birthday on July 12, 2013.In this paper, Malala Yousafzai’s speech will be analysed in some detail regarding her main arguments and verbal
presentation strategies. Furthermore, I will focus on the way Malala Yousafzai deals with both the verbal and non-verbal
aggression of the Taliban. I would also like to show how determined she is to argue against the Taliban’s escalation of the
conflict without letting herself getting entangled in a spiral of verbal violence.The theoretical framework for this analysis and the critical evaluation of the speech will be the concept of
“strategic maneuvering” as developed by van Eemeren (2010, 2018) within his framework of Pragma-Dialectics. This concept has frequently been applied to the analysis
of political discourse (see e.g. Kienpointner 2013, 2017).
Keywords: Malala Yousafzai, U.N. speech, political discourse, verbal and non-verbal aggression, strategic maneuvering, argumentative patterns
Published online: 02 April 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00034.kie
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00034.kie
Source texts
Source texts
1. Malala Yousafzai: Speech at the United Nations Youth Assembly
(12.72013) [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/12/malala-yousafzai-united-nations-education-speech-text; last seen on January 8, 2020; my own text is based on the transcription of the British newspaper The Guardian, which has been modified and corrected according to the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRh_30C8l6Y; length of the video (within the ABC News Special Report): 19:35; length of Malala Yousafzai’s speech: 00:40 – 17:36, that is, 17 minutes; last seen on January 8, 2020)]
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