Rhetorical features of the ousted Arab presidents' speeches : a discourse analysis approach

Abstract EN

The aim of this study is to explore the rhetorical feature(s) used by the ousted Arab Presidents most in their public appearances during the so-called “Arab Spring”.

In order to achieve this objective, a number of their speeches at the time were assessed critically from the standpoint of Austin’s and Searle’s Speech Act Theory.

Upon working out all the explicatures (linguistically inferred meanings) and the implicatures (contextually inferred meanings) of the original (Al-Jarrah, et al.

2018), it turned out to us that although the five speech acts (i.e.

Directives, Representatives, Commissives, Expressives, and Declarations) were all used, though disproportionately, warning (one type of Directives) was used the most.

The reason for this is probably related to the set of circumstances (both social and psychological) that were prevailing in the countries of those presidents at the time of the speeches under current scrutiny.

Given the claim that human cognitive activities cannot be detached from the social context where they take place (see Vygotsky 1978; 1986), I intend to show how those texts interacted with their social and cultural contexts to yield the optimal psychological impact on their audiences