Persuasive Strategies in Selected Speeches of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi

Abstract

The current paper is concerned with the analysis of political discourse, particularly the selected speeches of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Mohammed Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi during 2010 and 2011 as a reaction to massive protests which are regarded as the most critical incidents in their reign. The paper attempts to detect the persuasive techniques employed by Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (the former Tunisian president), Hosni Mubarak ( the former Egyptian president) and Muammar Gaddafi ( the former Libyan president) through building an eclectic model of linguistic analysis adopted from Aristotle’s theory of persuasion , Halliyday’s systemic functional approach , critical discourse analysis, and pragmatics. Key words: Rhetoric, positive self-presentation and negative other presentation, Systemic Functional Grammar,Transitivity processes, Person deixis, presupposition