Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream Speech : A rhetorical dicourse analysis

Abstract

The present study is a rhetorical analysis of Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech which was delivered in 1963. The main interest of this analysis is to identify the rhetorical strategies used by the Baptist president in his speech. Moreover, our first interest is to demonstrates the various rhetorical manouevres that surrounds the I Have Dream's speech as well as the persuasive appeals implimented in it. Thus, in our field of investigation two major models are applied in this speech; the five Aristotelian rhetorical appeals (ie, logos, ethos, pathos, kairos, tellos) and the Bitzer's rhetorical situation theory (1968). The present analytical study follows a descriptive design which is based in mixed-methods, including both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The first method is mainly used for the description of the rhetorical devices which encompasses both figures of speech and lexical semantic relations. In the other hand, the second one is mainly used for the representation of some frequencies with using tabulations. Furthermore, the integrating of the two models; the five Aristotelian appeals and Bitzer's rhetorical situation, played a crucial role in giving persuasiveness to the speech and to support all the arguments used in it. After a long analysis, we realized that Martin Luther King relied more on pathos as a tool to touch and attract the audience's emotion as well as the use of logos and ethos to hone his arguments whith logic and give evident proofs to make the listener know the real situation that is discussed in the text. In addition to this, the Baptist president's I Have A Dream speech is considered as one of the most persuasive and colorful speech in the history of America, since it is rich of the following rhetorical devices : figures of speech ( Alliteration, Anaphora, Hyperbole, Metaphor, Simile, Personification, Parallelism, Allusion, Rhetorical question) that made the speech more colorful and lexical semantic relations ( Synonymy, Antonymy, Metonymy) which made the text well-structured and persuasive