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6 Discourse Strategies and Rhetorical Devices in Robert F. Kennedy‟S

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6 Discourse Strategies and Rhetorical Devices in Robert F. Kennedy‟S 1 Introduction The aim of this thesis is to conduct research into a selection from Robert F. Kennedy‟s 1968 presidential election campaign speeches, in order to outline the key features of his utterances that earned him success in inspiring masses and frightened the power structure. One of the reasons I have decided to conduct research into Robert F. Kennedy‟s rhetoric is personal. The speech given on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. has drawn my attention to Robert Kennedy‟s unique talent as a public speaker. The other reason is driven by the fact that there is a lack of literature directly discussing the aspects of Robert F. Kennedy‟s rhetoric. With this work I want to demonstrate that the domain of Robert F. Kennedy‟s rhetoric is one worthy to be explored and to suggest the topic for further research. In Chapter 3, entitled Corpus Description and Evaluation I describe the events and the target audiences of the analysed public addresses. In addition I also delineate the main linguistic aspects of the particular speeches and I explain in what terms the analysed material meets the research criteria. In Chapter 4 I describe political speech as an individual genre within the domain of political discourse. I also explain from what perspective Robert Kennedy‟s selected addresses fall under the genre of political speech. I devote Chapter 5 to Robert Kennedy‟s biography, character study and the historico-political background of the time for several reasons. During the analysis of the core research material I lay great emphasis on the contextual meaning (Firth 1957 in 6 Downes 1998: 371) of Robert Kennedy‟s utterances. Therefore I want to make the reader familiar with the context and the so called „member resources‟ (Fairclough 1989) within the discourse of Robert Kennedy‟s selected addresses. Fairclough describes these member resources as prototypes “which people have in their heads and draw upon when they produce or interpret texts – including their knowledge of language, representations of the natural and social worlds they inhabit, values, beliefs, assumptions, and so on. […] they are social in the sense that they have social origins – they are socially generated, and their nature is dependent on the social relations and struggles out of which they were generated […]” (Fairclough 1989: 24) I regard Chapter 6 as the body of the thesis. This is the reason why its title is identical with the title of the thesis. Within this chapter I devote separate subchapters to the discourse strategies and different aspects of Robert Kennedy‟s rhetoric. I describe the ways of addressing the target audiences, the forms of interaction between Robert Kennedy and his audiences and the methods of confrontation of the target audiences. I examine the degree of Robert Kennedy‟s subjectivity and personal involvement in the selected addresses and I also introduce to the reader the means of persuasion applied by Robert Kennedy and his rhetorical idiosyncrasies. Chapter 6 as the most complex and most extensive unit of the thesis is intended to provide information essential for answering the research questions formulated in the following chapter. 7 2 Research Objectives, Hypotheses and Methodology The main objective of the analysis of Robert Kennedy‟s selected public addresses is to point out to what degree are his discourse strategies and rhetorical devices predetermined by factors like the topics covered, the speech events and the nature of the target audiences. According to Stanley Fish there are two ways of language that have shaped the „history of Western thought‟: “on the one hand, language that faithfully reflects or reports on matters of fact uncoloured by any personal or partisan agenda or desire; and on the other hand, language that is infected by partisan agendas and desires, and therefore colours and distorts the fact which it purports to reflect. It is the use of the second kind of language that makes one a rhetorician, while adherence to the first kind makes one a seeker after truth and an objective observer of the way things are.” (Fish 1989 in Richards 2008:6-7) I will analyse the discourse strategies and the rhetorical devices in Robert Kennedy‟s selected public addresses with an additional intention to prove that – in terms by Fish – he is “a seeker after truth and an objective observer of the way things are.” During the writing process I will concentrate my effort on answering the following research questions: 1. Are the discourse strategies and rhetorical devices predetermined by the topic rendered by the speaker? 2. Are the discourse strategies and rhetorical devices predetermined by the speech event and the nature of the target audience? I would like to build my hypothesis on Halliday‟s statement that “all language functions in contexts of situation and is relatable to those contexts. The question is not what 8 peculiarities of vocabulary, or grammar or pronunciation can be directly accounted for by reference to the situation. It is which kinds of situational factor determine which kinds of selection in the linguistic system.” (Halliday 2009: 94) Through my research I will attempt to prove that Robert Kennedy‟s rhetorical devices and discourse strategies in his selected utterances are predetermined by situational factors like the topic, the speech event and the nature of the target audience. I hereby underline that I will analyse the contextual meaning (Firth 1957 in Downes 1998) of Robert Kennedy‟s utterances in order to substantiate my theory of predetermination. From the methodological perspective, I subject the research material to a qualitative political discourse analysis. I will conduct a critical reading of the transcripts of the selected public speeches and simultaneously listen to the audio recordings of the addresses in order to outline also those aspects of Robert Kennedy‟s utterances which cannot be exposed only through the analysis of their transcripts. These are especially the paralinguistic features, like the tone of voice, intonation, gestures etc. The audio recordings will help me to clarify ambiguous situations where the question - „what is said?‟ will not allow for any adequate judgements. In order to avoid lengthy repetitions of the titles of the selected speeches I have decided to deploy an indexing method. Therefore I will further refer to the University of Kansas address as Speech A, to the Remarks on the Assassination of Martin Luther King as Speech B and to the Cleveland City Club address as Speech C. Through the research I will refer to Robert Francis Kennedy as Robert Kennedy or RFK. The core research material has been selected according to the following research criteria: - public speeches with a classical rhetorical organizational pattern 9 - public speeches delivered to target audiences of different nature - addresses with various speech events - addresses with various topics of moral values - utterances free of partisan agendas In my work I predominantly rely on the following literature: The factual information for Robert Kennedy‟s biography, character study and the historico-political background of the time I retrieve from Robert Kennedy and his Times (1985) written by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and from RFK: His Life and Death (1968) written by Jay Jacobs. The book RFK: Collected Speeches (1993) edited and introduced by Edwin O. Guthman and C. Richard Allen contains valuable information about the events and the context of the selected public addresses. The theoretical knowledge for the analysis of the discourse strategies and rhetorical devices in Robert F. Kennedy‟s selected public addresses I gain from the following works: Language and Power (1989) by Norman Fairclough is an especially useful source for critical discourse analysis as it contains several demonstrations of discourse analysis in practice. I use his model for the interpretation of the utterance meaning in the analysed material from the position of the analyst. I draw on his conception of the “member resources” within discourse, which justifies my decision to introduce to the reader the historico-political context of the analysed material and some biographical facts about Robert F. Kennedy. Meaning in Interaction: an Introduction to Pragmatics (1995) by Jenny Thomas provides me with the theoretical knowledge to decipher the illocutionary forces and the implicit meanings of Robert Kennedy‟s particular utterances. Through the analysis of the 10 selected addresses in Chapter 6 I rely on her model of interpreting illocutionary forces to understand the meaning of Robert Kennedy‟s utterances depending on their context. Language and Society (2009) by M.A.K. Halliday (edited by Jonathan J. Webster) furnishes me with the conceptions of the field, tenor and mode of the discourse, which allows me to identify, what is linguistically important in a given utterance in relation to its context. I build my hypotheses on Halliday‟s theory that situational factors determine the individual‟s selections in the linguistic system. Through the whole analysis of the selected addresses in Chapter 6 I rely on the above theory to identify to what degree are Robert Kennedy‟s utterances predetermined from a linguistic perspective by factors, like the topic rendered, the speech events and the nature of the target audiences. 11 3 Corpus Description and Evaluation The analysed resource material of this thesis consists of a selection of three significant speeches of Robert F. Kennedy‟s public addresses during his 1968 presidential campaign. Namely, in chronological order, the speech from March 18th, given at the University of Kansas, the Remarks on the Assassination of Martin Luther King from April 4th, delivered in Indianapolis and the Remarks on the Mindless Menace of Violence in America, delivered at the Cleveland City Club on April 5th. I would like to start the corpus description with some quantitative statistics about the analysed material.
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