On Obama's Collective Narrative

Since his 2004 keynote address at the Democratic Convention in Boston, Barack Obama has marked an outstanding change in the current American political scenario thanks to his inspiring rhetorical skills. Often echoing the most famous political speeches from the past, his ability to attract and to inspire audiences has gradually developed into the unique style that led to his electoral victory and characterised his inaugural speech on January 20, 2009. Obama’s linguistic strategies have been under scrutiny since the beginning of his political career by television and radio commentators and journalists as well as by renowned linguists (Lakoff, 2008; Crystal, 2008), who have unveiled his techniques, his rhetorical devices and the most significant semantic features of some of his public speeches. Merely the content of his speeches is certainly not enough to explain his success, it is also the mode of delivery, the way he uses his voice combined with his personal multicultural narrative that made Obama an effective, persuasive and engaging candidate. In order to identify main discourse features of persuasion used by Barack Obama, a corpus of his speeches, from his 2004 address in Boston to his inaugural speech in Washington, was collected and analysed in terms of recurrent linguistic patterns, key words, word-cluster frequency lists and collocations by means of corpus assisted discourse analysis, the use of specific software and two reference corpora. The initial results of the analysis as well as ways the corpus can be used as a language teaching tool within a university course aimed at developing students’ ability to identify the rhetorical structure, the prosodic prominence and the main syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse features in Obama’s speeches are presented.