On the mobilization of emotions in the addresses to the Nation of Senegalese Presidents
Linguistique
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55595/e2qywg97Keywords:
Argument, argumentation, context, speech, emotion, pathos, persuasion,Abstract
This article adopts a discourse analysis perspective in that it considers the object of study (the political discourse), the context, and the circumstances of the utterance, within a comprehensive dynamic of meaning construction. It addresses the debate on emotions that has been ongoing since Aristotle's Rhetoric and continues today with the advent of pragmatic trends in discourse analysis. Indeed, from American psychologist Paul Ekman, known for his work on basic emotions and compassion, to Étienne and Battistelli, who developed annotation schemes for the linguistic analysis of emotions in texts, studies on emotions are increasingly developing. Following the same logic, we would like to analyze here the explicit, implicit, and reconstructed content of emotions present in a selective corpus focused on the speeches at the UN of four Senegalese heads of state: Léopold Sédar Senghor (1960 to 1981), Abdou Diouf (1981 to 2000), Abdoulaye Wade (2000 to 2012), and Macky Sall (2012 to 2024). The aim is to demonstrate that the argumentative exploitation of emotion is a reality in Senegalese political discourse, and that the Senegalese presidents in the corpus use, with persuasive aims, a discursive particularity of emotions based on gestures, voice, and stylistic devices.
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The author states that he did not receive any funding to conduct this study.Conference Proceedings Volume
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