A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF FIVE PERSUASSIVE SPEECHES OF MARTIN LUTHER KING JR

Abstract

The core aspiration that led to investigate and study the five speeches of Martin Luther King Jr, who is known to be an influential and dominant orator to understand the distinguishing, contextual, structural, and thematic features incorporating the linguistics strategies adopted by him. The type of research chosen in this research is qualitative approach and narrowed down to five speeches from twenty-five hundred speeches to develop comprehensive understanding and result oriented research for future perspectives. The methodology opted is Norman Fairclough 3D Critical Discourse Analysis model that has 3 layers of analysis which are firstly, the discourse as description of pure text;secondly is discourse as interpretation of text as-discursive-practice; thirdly is discourse as explanation of text as-social -practice included. The study is restricted to King’s persuasive strategies analyzing from Political Discourse Analysis in which there is structural framework of argumentative strategies for actions with five categories for five persuasive speeches initiating from, claims for an action; goals; circumstances; goals-means; and values. The collection of data from the five notorious speeches by calculating the frequency of words in the speeches to determine the thematic; semantic; ideologies; intentions; syntax; variations of the linguistic features. It has been concluded that Martin Luther King was a very optimistic; peacemaker and action-oriented man with bold symbolic, freedom of expressions who managed to win the masses with leadership potential, pragmatic style and convincing words. He advocated the nation to learn from History to be aware of their legal and fair voting rights as American citizen by current non-violent marches and demonstration to shape. The future of Afro- American as free nation with equal, just and fair rights.