Biden's Rhetoric: A Corpus-Based Study of the Political Speeches of the American President Joe Biden

Abstract

—This paper is a rhetorical analysis of the political discourse of the American President Joe Biden's speeches. The data of the study consist of 40 speeches (120,028) words delivered by Joe Biden from January 2021 to February 2022. This study examines how President Biden tries to persuade the audience employing different rhetorical devices. It investigates one main canon of rhetoric, Invention, following the classical Aristotelian classification of rhetoric. In analysing Invention, Biden's logical, ethical, and emotional appeals to the audience will be investigated. The analysis reveals that by using the first-person pronouns 'I' and 'we' Biden morally tries to engage the audience. The quantitative study demonstrates that the inclusive pronoun 'we' is the most frequently used pronoun in the corpus to build a bond with the audience. The pronoun 'I' is the second most common pronoun in the corpus for establishing the credibility, competence, and reliability of the speaker. The President tries to disseminate the good sentiments of hope and love, which are the most common lexical terms in the corpus relating to emotions. Biden also uses numerous logical appeals to persuade the audience, such as employing statistics and numbers, citing authoritative individuals and sources such as the Bible, and argument from a predicament, in order to deliver compelling arguments.