Psico Socio Linguistica

Analisis Linguistica del Discurso de Martin L. King










CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION 1
ANALYSIS AND REFLECTION 2
1. THE AUDIENCE OF THE SPEECH 2
2. ANALYSIS OF THE CORPUS 3
CONCLUSION 7
BIBLIOGRAPHY 8
ATTACHMENTS 9
The Corpus of Analysis: Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech (1963) 9




INTRODUCTION




Based on Jones & Wareing (2000: 9) words,language is related with power, mainly in its two functions: referential, which has to do with the representation people have about reality, and affective impact, which has to do with the acceptance or not what is said to us.

If language can create meanings Jones & Wareing (2000: 7) and people’s representation of reality (ibid: 9), and if through language power can be achieved (ibid:11), it is obvious that language is an instrument that politicians need to use carefully, once by using words and meanings behind the clauses, sometimes they achieve to move the masses. For that reason, the topic of analysis here selected is Language and Politics.

The corpus of analysis to this essay is one of the best known political speeches I have a Dream pronounced in 1963 by MartinLuther King. This speech has been chosen as the corpus of this essay once it represents one of the most famous speeches in our modern history to the proclamation of Afro-American society human rights and had a great influence on people’s mind in that time and still alive throughout out our days.

Therefore, this essay is proposed to answer the following question about I have a Dream speech:Are some rhetorical features used that allow this speech to be a persuasive one?






ANALYSIS AND REFLECTION




THE AUDIENCE OF THE SPEECH




As Tuman (2003: 71) states, a good speech is that created to a specific audience. This way Tuman refers the importance to consider the audience of the discourse, before analyzing the speech itself. Accordingly to this, isessential to think about some of the questions that Tuman suggests (ibid: 72-75) and which are referred and answered below:


1.1. “Who is the specific audience?”(ibidem)

The specific audience is mainly people in a peaceful demonstration, besides those who were seeing the march at home.


1.2. “When (...) Where the speech will take place?” (ibidem)

The speech was delivered at thesteps of Lincoln memorial, who one hundred years before had promoted the Proclamation of Emancipation, and in front of thousands of people during The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.


1.3. “Is there any possibility for common ground between the speaker and the audience?” (ibidem)

This speech is strongly based on the American Constitution and the Declaration ofIndependence. It was delivered by the pacifist Afro-American Martin Luther King, who proclaims for equal rights in a moment of history that people, mainly Afro-Americans, were still fighting for equal rights and the end of racial discrimination.

1.4. “What is the disposition of the audience?” (ibidem)

“I have a Dream” was proclaimed to a sympathetic audience (ibid: 74), once it wasexposed during a peaceful demonstration, where thousands of Afro-Americans and defenders of equal rights were present.





2. ANALYSIS OF THE CORPUS


Apart from being proclaimed to a sympathetic (ibidem) audience, Luther King’s speech had such a great impact in that time as to still having so much importance nowadays. So we need to understand if there is present some rhetoricaldevices that promoted the greatness of this speech.

On the one hand, it is important to analyze aspects that Tuman states as necessary in a persuasive speech. Those aspects were referred by Aristotle in his theory of rhetoric and are three: ethos, pathos and logos (ibid: 75-77).

On the other hand, there are other rhetorical devices that politics adopt in order to “increase the...