This research was conducted to analyze persuading strategies applied in
Barack Obama weekly addresses year of 2012. The objectives of this research
were finding language features of persuading employed by Barack Obama in his
weekly addresses, examining how Barack Obama linguistically realized his verbal
engagement toward the target viewers through his speeches, and discovering the
reasons why Barack Obama delivered his speeches the way he did.
This is a descriptive qualitative research. Thus, the data of this research
were collected by using criterion-based sampling. The criteria of sampling in this
research are features of persuasive language and relational process as well as the
reasons behind them. This research uses documents analysis method. By using the
document analysis method, I obtained five documents of Barack Obama weekly
address year of 2012. The data were selected based on related topics.
The result of data analysis found in this research were divided into three:
(1) In order to persuade the citizens, Barack Obama employed persuasive
language covering the use of repetitions, adjectives, verbs, and rhetorical patterns
covering some technical registers. (2) Obama also realized the relationship
towards the viewers linguistically covering the use of formality aspect, the use of
declarative mode, pronoun and modalities. (3) Related to persuading strategy used
in his speech, Obama had the intention to address various issues including Europe
crisis effect, the role of American president to help his citizen’s life better, and
presidential general election year of 2012.
This research is expected to be beneficial for other researchers, especially
in using Critical Discourse Analysis as the approach. Additionally, this research is
expected to give more contribution for scrutinizing the genuine intentions of a
powerful person in delivering the speeches.
Keywords: Persuasive Strategy, Critical Discourse Analysis, Power
