Analyzing and comparing de Blasio’s and Quinn’s speech in their
democratic election programs for 2013 New York Mayoral Elections
This paper aims to compare de Blasio’s and Quinn’s programs for
2013 New York Mayoral Elections to reveal their rhetoric and figurative language
as a means of persuasion in political campaigns. This along with their
backgrounds, appearance and previous supports will disclose some key points
contributing to de Blasio’s victory. As this study focuses on linguistics, I
rely on
Political Discourse Analysis (
Wilson, 2001),
Critical Discourse
Analysis (
Fairclough and Wodak,
1997;
Wodak and Meyer,
2009), van Dijk’s
Sociocognitive Approach (
2008) and
polarization
(
1999) – Chilton’s
legitimation/delegitimation (
2004) –, Charteris-Black’s
Corpus Approach to
Critical Metaphor Analysis (
2004), politeness and facework (
Brown and Levinson, 1987;
Goffman, 1967), and
Taboada and
Grieve’s (2004) approach of
Appraisal Theory
(
Martin and White, 2005;
White, 2012). The results will show
which verbal devices and phenomena are used as a linguistic weapon to influence
people’s thoughts and attract voters, as well as to give a positive image of
themselves (positive self-representation) or a negative image of the political
opponent (negative other-representation).
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical framework
- 3.Corpus and methodology
- 4.2013 New York Mayoral Elections and Democratic candidates’ background
- 5.Analysis
- 5.1Comparison of the topics and sections in both programs
- 5.2Bill de Blasio
- 5.3Christine Quinn
- 6.Conclusions
- Notes
-
References
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