A Rhetorical Analysis of the Presidential Election Campaign Discourse in Zambia

Abstract

This study explores the political discourse of the presidential elections in Zambia with a view to establishing the rhetorical strategies of this discourse. The study is informed by the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) analytical framework. The main research objective that the study addresses relates to how rhetorical strategies are achieved in political discourse by employing certain rhetorical devices and how they are exploited by politicians to achieve their intentions and ambitions.

Given the type of data that were collected, a qualitative content analysis approach was employed for analysis. The recordings of the discourse by the candidate under investigation that were held between 11^th May and 10^th August 2016, were collected from the different media houses in video form and were then transcribed verbatim. Thereafter, excerpts were selected from the discourse at random and analysed by applying content analysis using the inductive model.

The results of the study indicate that politicians make use of personal pronouns and other syntactic elements which include nominalization, parallelism, passivation, modality, cohesivation and unification as rhetorical devices to highlight their political will, nerve and confidence through their campaign message thereby achieving persuasion in their campaigns.

The study concludes that the political candidate under study made use of personal pronouns together with modal verbs and other syntactic features as rhetorical devices in campaign messages to achieve persuasion. Furthermore, politicians lean on the extremely polarised view of us versus them, by presenting themselves positively and their opponents negatively.