John Kerry’s Political Rhetoric: An Account of the Main Rhetorical Features of His Oral Delivery

Abstract

An accurate use of language is a key factor in achieving personal and public objectives in all spheres of our everyday interaction, but the exploitation of the appropriate linguistic resources becomes crucial for those professionals involved in the field of politics. Obtaining the support of the masses, legitimising political policies, or succeeding in public debates and parliamentary negotiations may depend to a great extent on the kind of language a politician employs and its adequacy to each political event. This paper analyses the oral delivery of senator John F. Kerry –the favourite Democratic Party candidate for the US presidency in the 2004 presidential elections– in four public events (two debates and two speeches) celebrated before the election day. Our study focuses particularly on the analysis of a series of rhetorical patterns and linguistic devices employed by the senator in order to empower his argumentations, namely: three-part statements, contrastive pairs, lexical and syntactic repetition, purposive selection and use of pronouns, addressing formulae, introductory formulae for personal opinion and ideology, and the usage of discourse organisers. The results of this study hint, inter alia, that behind the apparent spontaneity of Kerry’s oral delivery there is a selective use of linguistic devices, which is necessarily the product of prior consideration and thoughtful discourse elaboration.