Political discourse has been the prolific research land on account of their great
significance. According to van Dijk (1997), political discourse analysis could
potentially make much contribution to political science in giving genuine answers to
political questions. Prominently, Fairclough (1995) demonstrated an approach to
considering political discourse as a contribution to the development of critical
discourse analysis, highlighting political discourse as essentially a form of
argumentation to come up with eventual political decisions. In politics, although both
argumentation and persuasion are defined as a “non-violent linguistic tool to perform
as a cognitive pattern of problem-solving” (Wodak, 2018) or any attempt that uses
logic to incite a person to take action or to change an opinion or belief, the study
targets at persuasion spreading persuasive strategies instead of argumentation only.
The root cause for such a choice was the fact that persuasion is considered to be a call
to action that is also based on appealing to emotion and feeling (Fernandez-Ulloa,
2019), which also matches the study’s focus of touching all three rhetorical pillars in
persuasion (logic, credibility and emotions) (Aristotle, 1984).
Besides, among various approaches to political discourse analysis, the study is
grounded on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as the primary approach to reach its
ultimate aim of investigating into the use of persuasive strategies employed in
political discourse. More specifically, the discourses in the 2016 U.S. presidential
campaign are chosen to be under discussion at length since this particular campaign
sparked considerably intense speeches and strong divided political ideologies from
the two candidates: Donald Trump, a political outsider and businessman with no prior
experience in government, representing the Republican Party, and Hillary Clinton, a
former Secretary of State, representing the Democratic Party. Accordingly, their
hidden ideologies and power being used as a way to win the listeners’ votes and
endorsement are expected to be displayed eventually, entailing the employed
persuasive strategies to achieve their ultimate goal of becoming the president of
America. To comprehensively uncover the persuasive techniques and its lexico-
grammatical features employed in political speeches, such primary research
approaches as CDA (Fairclough, 1995, 2010) utilizing the exploration of ideologies
disguised underneath political discourse, along with the Systemic Functional
Grammar (SFG) (Halliday, 2004, 2014) to unveil the metafunctions in the persuasive
strategies and Aristotle (1984)’s theory of persuasion to assist the classification of the
persuasive strategies found, are necessarily taken into consideration. In fact, many
scholars have delved into various research areas on the election speeches delivered
by presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump from different angles
of CDA, Discourse Analysis to Functional Grammar. However, most of the studies
are merely restricted within the feature analysis of wordings and structures of the
speeches, but hardly have they developed a comparison between the speeches given
by different candidates from the facet of metafunctions and rhetoric strategies
highlighting strategies of persuasion from the light of CDA or hardly dug into the
reasoning or argumentation between the two politicians. This makes the study on
these features in their political speeches given by presidential candidates Clinton and
Trump in their 2016 election campaign even more vital. In a word, the rationale for
this piece of research on the persuasive strategies of election speeches of Hillary
Clinton and Donald Trump could be presented as follows.