الفهرس 
Critical Discourse AnalysisOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
This dissertation investigates the use of some manipulative discursive structures within a selection of speeches, delivered by President Obama in the first year of his two presidential terms. In order to achieve this purpose, the study employs the tools of Corpus Linguistics (CL) combined with van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis/Socio-Cognitive Approach (CDA/SCA), which represent a three-dimensional framework for investigating manipulation. By incorporating these approaches, the research analyzes some manipulative morphological, syntactic, semantic, argumentative and rhetorical strategies used by Obama in his 2009 and 2013 speeches. It is revealed that by applying these manipulative techniques, Obama arouses not only his people, but also the world’s faith and trust toward himself and his government’s policies, actions and future businesses. Chapter one is divided into two parts. The first part gives an overview of the range of techniques that are available in CDA. It also examines van Dijk’s triangular framework (SCA), which unites discourse, cognition and society together in order to detect manipulation within any written or spoken discourse. The second part comprises five sections. The first section offers a general idea of the main features of the CL approach, which are effectively employed to analyze political and media discourse. The second section examines how the broader term of corpus-based approach is utilized to include both corpus-driven and corpus-based approaches. The third section then illustrates the combination between CDA and CL in order to clarify their relationship. As for the fourth section, it presents previous studies and in what way this dissertation is different. Finally, the methodology of this dissertation is presented. Chapter two is divided into three sections. The first section explores some of the semantic strategies used within Obama’s 2009 and 2013 speeches, while the argumentative tools are examined in the second section. As for the third section, it uncovers the rhetorical strategies used by Obama in order to manipulate the public minds. Chapter three includes two sections. The first section explores some of the morphological manipulative strategies used within the first years of Obama’s two presidential terms. As for the second section, it examines some syntactic tools, which are employed by Obama. The results show that Obama employs manipulative discursive strategies, which tend to form language patterns that comprise the highest level of complexity in order to block the understanding of the public about his real objectives. Such hidden information which violates the recipients’ right to be fully informed about the truth is generally preferred by Obama and his administration, in order to manipulate people’s shared knowledge, beliefs and ideologies. The study also reveals that Obama’s speeches are growing to be less sophisticated, for he has utilized more manipulative discursive structures within his first presidential term than his second one. Moreover, the study depicts a change in the use of some of these discursive strategies in Obama’s second presidential term.