The language of power: discourse analysis on speech acts, turn-taking and linguistic features of eight different female politicians native in English

Abstract

The study of discourse analysis in political landscapes has been an interesting and extensively studied research topic; however, in the context of illocutionary acts and linguistics features we have found a still-developing field. The present thesis is a discourse analysis study that researches and compares interviews and debates from eight different native English speaking female politicians. The purpose of this study was mainly to characterise the language used by this specific group, as well as determine the most common speech acts and turn-taking strategies among them in the context of a public political setting. To do this, the linguistic elements of each subject were studied and categorised into different charts that organised the results assigning different linguistic features with different speech acts, then these charts were compared to determine tendencies shared between the subjects. The result of the study shows that certain speech acts and turn-taking strategies were more used than others; to emphasise and to maintain turn were the most used amongst all the subjects. Plus, certain linguistic and extralinguistic elements were also frequently Falling intonations, hand gestures and repetition of syntactic structures, to name a few. The discussion of the result states that these tendencies exist because of the context involving the studied interviews and debates, falling intonations are more appropriate in political context, emphasise is extremely important when explaining political perspectives and the subjects had to maintain their turn because they were prone to being interrupted for being women.