Dr. Manar Kareem Mehdi,
Department of English, College of Education, Al-Zahraa University for Women, Iraq
Persuasion is an interactive communicative process in which the persuader aims at influencing the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of his audience (Jowett and O'Donnell, 2012: 32). As such, there are certain persuasive techniques and strategies employed by the persuader in order to achieve his ultimate goal of gaining his audience's agreement and support. Accordingly, this paper sets itself the task of detecting the persuasive strategies and techniques utilized in Imam Al-Baqir’s (a.s.) speeches. More precisely, it aims at elucidating the persuasion configuration of the above mentioned speeches. Consequently, it is hypothesized that (1) the most prevalent persuasive strategy adopted by the Imam is response changing, (2) persuasive techniques such as: alliteration, rhetorical questions, repetition, exaggeration, emotive language, and metaphor are frequently utilized by the Imam. To achieve the aim of this study and test its hypotheses, three speeches of Imam Al- Baqir have been chosen for analysis by utilizing the persuasion model developed by the study. Moreover, a statistical method represented by percentage equation has been implemented to demonstrate the findings of the analysis of the data. Results of the analysis verify the above mentioned hypotheses.
Keywords: Persuasion, Alliteration, Rhetorical Questions, Repetition, Emotive Language, Metaphor
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Sixth International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.LLLD.IR), 9-10 October 2021, Ahwaz.