A Contrastive Study of Stancetaking in Obama’s Political Discourse

Abstract

An analysis of stancetaking in discourses enables us to analyze the implicit attitude of the speaker in a message. Although this is interesting in itself when dealing with general texts, it is even more important when dealing with political discourse. As it is well-known, President Barack Obama is known as one of the best orators and many studies corroborate this. The aim of this paper is to analyze three different speeches by Obama over a period of two years, delivered in three different countries, to analyze the differences in the stances used in order to determine his implication in the message. Secondly, I shall apply the Chi-square statistical method (X2) to compare the expected frequency of using stance markers with the stated frequency to reveal the possible incongruences.